12-Week Study & Discussion Guide

Lessons in Chemistry

by Bonnie Garmus·85 discussion questions

Lead your group with the discussion already prepared: a reading plan, thoughtful questions, and printable handouts for everyone.

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Week 1 — FreeRead the opening chapters of Lessons in Chemistry through Elizabeth's introduction to Hastings Research Institute and her first significant encounters with Calvin Evans.

Discussion question your group will work through:

1.Garmus establishes Elizabeth's voice and worldview almost immediately. What specific details — her word choices, her interactions, her habits — tell you exactly who she is before the plot has even taken shape?

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About This Study Guide

At a glance: this is a 12-week study and discussion guide for Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, with 85 questions organized by reading assignment. Week 1 is free to read, with no card required.

Lessons in Chemistry is Bonnie Garmus's debut novel and a runaway global phenomenon — a sharp, funny, and deeply felt story set in early 1960s California that asks what happens when a brilliant woman refuses to be diminished by the world around her. At its center is Elizabeth Zott, a research chemist who dreams of contributing something meaningful to science but is repeatedly blocked by the institutional sexism of Hastings Research Institute. When an accidental pregnancy, a devastating loss, and financial desperation conspire against her, Elizabeth finds herself hosting a daytime cooking show called Supper at Six — and, to everyone's surprise, including her own, she transforms it into something radical: a platform for women to see themselves as capable, intelligent, and worthy of more than the roles society has assigned them. Alongside Elizabeth is a richly drawn cast that includes the Nobel Prize–nominated Calvin Evans, their precocious daughter Madeline (nicknamed Six-Thirty after the family dog), the producer Walter Pine, and the neighborhood polymath Harriet Sloane. Together they make the novel not just a feminist manifesto but a warm, witty, and sometimes heartbreaking story about love, grief, belonging, and the courage it takes to be exactly who you are.

This guide is designed for book clubs or solo readers moving through the novel chapter by chapter over roughly twelve weeks. Each week, read the assigned section, jot down your initial reactions — what surprised you, what made you laugh, what made you uncomfortable — and then bring those notes into conversation with the questions below. The questions mix close reading (returning to specific scenes and details) with broader reflection on character, theme, and craft, so feel free to skip around or linger wherever the conversation catches fire.

No background in chemistry or 1960s history is required, though you may find yourself wanting to look things up. The novel rewards readers who pay attention to its recurring motifs — the language of chemistry, the persistence of rules and the people who break them, the many forms that ambition and love can take. Come ready to disagree, to laugh, and to ask yourself which lessons Elizabeth Zott is really teaching.

Week 1: Opening — Meeting Elizabeth Zott

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Read the opening chapters of Lessons in Chemistry through Elizabeth's introduction to Hastings Research Institute and her first significant encounters with Calvin Evans.

Before the cooking show, before the heartbreak, there is simply Elizabeth Zott — a woman who insists on being taken seriously in a world determined not to. This week we meet her on her own terms.

1.Garmus establishes Elizabeth's voice and worldview almost immediately. What specific details — her word choices, her interactions, her habits — tell you exactly who she is before the plot has even taken shape?

a.What does her approach to language (insisting on precision, rejecting euphemism) reveal about her character?

b.How does the novel's narrative voice — often wry and omniscient — complement or complicate Elizabeth's own perspective?

2.Hastings Research Institute is portrayed as a place where women are tolerated at best and undermined at worst. What specific policies, attitudes, or individual behaviors make this atmosphere vivid and believable rather than cartoonishly villainous?

3.Calvin Evans is introduced as a loner and a grudge-holder — someone who has cultivated difficulty as a kind of armor. What draws him to Elizabeth, and what does his attraction to "her mind" suggest about what he has been missing?

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All 12 weeks, 85 questions, thoughtful discussion prompts, and printable weekly handouts — plus the full PDF — so your prep is reading it over, not writing it from scratch.

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Week 1 sample · first 3 questions

Group handout: Lessons in Chemistry

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12-Week Schedule

  1. Week 1Opening — Meeting Elizabeth Zott7 questions
  2. Week 2Elizabeth and Calvin — True Chemistry7 questions
  3. Week 3Loss and Its Aftermath7 questions
  4. Week 4Supper at Six — Elizabeth Takes the Stage7 questions
  5. Week 5Madeline and the Question of Education7 questions
  6. Week 6Harriet, the Neighbors, and Community7 questions
  7. Week 7Secrets and the Search for the Past7 questions
  8. Week 8Resistance and Backlash7 questions
  9. Week 9Identity, Ambition, and What Women Are Allowed to Want7 questions
  10. Week 10Reckoning and Resolution7 questions
  11. Week 11The Final Pages — What Elizabeth Leaves Behind7 questions
  12. Week 12Review & Reflection — The Whole Experiment8 questions

Week 2: Elizabeth and Calvin — True Chemistry

All 7 questions →

Read the chapters covering Elizabeth and Calvin's relationship, from their early partnership to the deepening of their bond and their unconventional domestic life.

1.Elizabeth and Calvin's relationship develops without many of the traditional romantic gestures the genre usually relies on. What does their courtship actually look like, and why does it feel earned rather than rushed?

+ 6 more questions in the full guide

Week 3: Loss and Its Aftermath

All 7 questions →

Read the chapters covering Calvin's sudden death and Elizabeth's immediate reckoning with grief, single parenthood, and professional displacement.

1.Calvin's death is sudden and almost absurdly mundane in its circumstances. How does Garmus's choice to handle it this way — without melodrama — affect the reader's experience of the loss?

+ 6 more questions in the full guide

Week 4: Supper at Six — Elizabeth Takes the Stage

All 7 questions →

Read the chapters in which Elizabeth is recruited to host Supper at Six and begins to develop her unconventional on-air approach.

1.Elizabeth does not want to host a cooking show, and the circumstances that bring her to it are less than triumphant. How does Garmus prevent this setup from feeling like a defeat or a comedown for her protagonist?

+ 6 more questions in the full guide

Week 5: Madeline and the Question of Education

All 7 questions →

Read the chapters focusing on Madeline's school years, her intellectual gifts, and Elizabeth's battles with the educational system on her behalf.

1.Madeline is portrayed as precociously gifted in ways that mirror both her parents. Which qualities feel distinctly like Elizabeth's inheritance, which feel like Calvin's, and which seem entirely her own?

+ 6 more questions in the full guide

Week 6: Harriet, the Neighbors, and Community

All 7 questions →

Read the chapters that expand the world of Elizabeth's neighborhood and deepen the role of Harriet Sloane and the community of Supper at Six viewers.

1.Harriet Sloane is one of the novel's great supporting characters. What specific qualities make her indispensable to Elizabeth, and what does their friendship cost each of them?

+ 6 more questions in the full guide

Week 7: Secrets and the Search for the Past

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Read the chapters in which Calvin's past — his origins, the secrets he kept, and the mystery of his early life — begins to surface.

1.The revelation of details about Calvin's past — particularly around his origins and early life — reframes everything we thought we knew about him. How does this new information change your understanding of his choices during his lifetime?

+ 6 more questions in the full guide

Week 8: Resistance and Backlash

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Read the chapters in which Elizabeth's growing influence on Supper at Six draws organized opposition, professional threats, and personal attacks.

1.The opposition to Elizabeth's show comes from multiple directions — network executives, sponsors, religious groups, and individual critics. How does Garmus distinguish between these different sources of resistance, and which feels most threatening to Elizabeth?

+ 6 more questions in the full guide

Week 9: Identity, Ambition, and What Women Are Allowed to Want

All 7 questions →

Read the chapters that most directly examine the internal lives of Elizabeth and the women around her — their ambitions, their disappointments, and their private reckonings.

1.Elizabeth's ambition has always been to do science — to contribute, to discover, to be taken seriously as a researcher. How does she reckon with the fact that her greatest influence comes through a medium she never sought and initially disdained?

+ 6 more questions in the full guide

Week 10: Reckoning and Resolution

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Read the chapters in which the novel's major conflicts — professional, personal, and familial — begin to move toward resolution, including Madeline's discoveries about her father's past.

1.As the novel moves toward resolution, which of its threads feels most satisfyingly resolved, and which feels most deliberately left open? What does that distinction suggest about what Garmus most wants to argue?

+ 6 more questions in the full guide

Week 11: The Final Pages — What Elizabeth Leaves Behind

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Read the final chapters of Lessons in Chemistry through to the novel's conclusion.

1.How does the novel end for Elizabeth — professionally, personally, emotionally? Does the ending feel earned, or does it ask you to accept more than the preceding pages have prepared you for?

+ 6 more questions in the full guide

Week 12: Review & Reflection — The Whole Experiment

All 8 questions →

No new reading this week. Return to any passages, scenes, or characters that have stayed with you across the full novel.

1.Looking back across all eleven chapters: which single scene, image, or exchange feels most representative of what Lessons in Chemistry is, at its core, trying to do?

+ 7 more questions in the full guide
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About the Lessons in Chemistry guide

How many weeks is the Lessons in Chemistry study guide?

This discussion guide covers Lessons in Chemistry in 12 sessions, with week-by-week reading references and book-club questions for each session.

How many discussion questions are included?

The complete guide includes 85 discussion questions across 12 weeks — an average of 7 questions per week, designed for group conversation.

Can I use this guide for a book club?

Yes — the questions are written for group discussion and work well for book clubs, small groups, and couples reading together.

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