So why did I leave science again? … Was it because I didn’t like it or I wasn’t good enough to do it?
Does it matter?
Maybe this book won’t resonate with people who aren’t like me and the narrator: people who’ve left science. Or maybe it will. Everyone has left something behind. Maybe that feeling of loss is universal? If not, maybe I’m not the one to review this book because it read like the internal monologue that goes on in my head when I can’t sleep, or when I’m walking to the mailbox, or when I’m driving to the library, or whenever there isn’t anything to distract me from my own thoughts. Our narrator leaves science (chemistry) and then has to decide whether to follow her boyfriend, who is still nuzzled into science’s temperamental embrace, to a small town where he has gotten a job. I left science (math) and then had to decide whether to follow my husband, who is still nuzzled into science’s (math) temperamental embrace, to a small town where he has gotten a job.
I am the girl who followed you and I know what happens to those girls. They are never happy and then they carry that unhappiness everywhere.
I detached myself from reading this, otherwise I would have gone mad. I didn’t have any beakers to destroy, like the narrator, but I would have if I had some. This book gave me the plunging feeling in ribs of having made the wrong decision all over again. I know every feeling, the narrator’s every feeling. Detach all I want, doesn’t work when I’ve been emptied out like this.
Maybe go find an English major. Maybe their review will give a dispassionate appraisal. Reading my own truth and mine doesn’t.
Chemistry by Weike Wang went on sale May 23, 2017.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.