Author Bonnie Garmus: ‘I’ve gotten so many death threats. The Andrew Tate crowd is alive and well’
Eleven years ago, Bonnie Garmus almost drowned in a lake in Switzerland . She was swimming across Lake Zurich, near where she and her family were living, before they moved to London in 2017. She was a strong swimmer, but it was dark, 5.30am, before the ferries had started, and it was foggy, far foggier than she had realised when she set off. Usually it took her 25 minutes to swim across the lake. But when Garmus glanced at her watch, she realised she had been swimming for 45 minutes. She started to panic. She couldn’t feel her feet, her hands or her face. “The fog was getting much worse. My goggles were fogging up. I kept getting turned around. I kept thinking, ‘any minute I’ll see the lights of the bridge, or I’ll see the lights of something’, and I never did. I began to think I was going to die.” Then, all of a sudden, she looked up and saw this huge swan, wings flapping, bearing down on the water, “like an enormous duvet cover” or – she feared, thinking death – “an angel”. The swan hustled her in the water, harrying her like a sheep dog, until it was positioned behind her. “It started hurting me and I started to swim, and then it went out in front of me. I decided that maybe it was going to lead me to shore where its babies were. I wasn’t sure – swans don’t like people. But every time I took a stroke, it let me touch its back. About 25 minutes later, I saw the schwimmbad come into view. There was the ladder. The swan had stuck with me the whole way.” Comfortably ensconced in her London home, wearing a red and white floral top, glasses perched atop her head, Garmus says over a video call that “it was the stupidest mistake I’ve made with my life ever”. As a story retold, however, it’s the kind of unnerving, fairy-dust-laden anecdote you could only imagine coming from the author of Lessons in Chemistry, a global bestseller that features a dog, Six-Thirty, who has learned nearly 1,000 words and helps Elizabeth Zott, the novel’s brilliant chemist turned TV chef, to the point where he even teaches words to her unborn child. Surprising, endearing, joyful, heartbreaking and strongly feminist, Lessons in Chemistry took everyone by surprise when it was published in 2022, not least Garmus herself. Until that point, Garmus was a copywriter coming up to retirement age. Lessons in Chemistry changed everything. Garmus wrote the first chapter after a meeting in which her voice went unheard by her male counterparts. Elizabeth, her lead character, was a woman in 1950s California who triumphed against the patriarchy; against convention and against that chorus of put-down voices. The book was adapted into a successful Apple+ series starring Brie Larson . It inspired women around the world. And it made Garmus into a kind of flash point – a hero to some, a target to others. “A lot of people assume it must be fun to have a bestseller, but I can’t tell you, I’ve gotten so many death threats over Lessons in Chemistry,” she says. “It was really hard to take. It’s ongoing.” Why? “A woman chemist? The Andrew Tate crowd is alive and well. They contact me through my website or send DMs. And I’m not the only one. Women novelists especially go through this. Lessons in Chemistry: An alchemy of dry wit, sharp satire and original premise “When I get attacked like that for being female, I just think, they clearly don’t know their chemistry, because if they did know their chemistry, they would understand what women are made of,” she says. For every horrible message Garmus has received, she has received another from a woman who tells her how much the book has helped them. She is a firm believer in helping people believe in themselves. “I don’t think anyone with a dream is ridiculous,” she says. “Everything that you do, if you don’t take action on it, then it won’t get done. But all it really requires is a thick skin and perseverance.” “What I love about that book is how it’s inspired people to say, ‘It’s not over for me yet’. Since Lessons in Chemistry came out, I have seen a whole mass of women who decided in their 40s and 50s to go to med school, and they did, and they’re doctors. To get [those] emails and DMs from people, I didn’t see that coming.” The youngest of four girls, Garmus didn’t come from a wealthy background. Raised in California (she has also lived in Seattle and Geneva), her mother was a nurse in the 1980s, during the Aids crisis, and her father was an entomologist. She grew up wanting to write, but understanding she needed to make a living. “Fiction is terrible in terms of making a living.” She did a three-month writing course at Curtis Brown, but it was her career in copywriting, she says, that turned her into a successful novelist. “We are always pretending we know and we have to do enormous research to come up to speed, like I did with chemistry,” she says. “You get to learn and it’s this gift that you get on the job. I didn’t always love what I learned, but it keeps you curious, it keeps you alive.” Garmus’s new novel, Peck & Peck, takes her into uncharted waters once more. Set around the offices of Peck & Peck, a prestigious poetry quarterly in New York in the 1980s, it’s a whimsical, lovingly crafted and frequently very funny story of Batter, a college graduate named after a dog (a heroic dog naturally), whose dream is to become an editor at the poetry house. Batter has an ear – he naturally knows that “an anapaest is a metrical foot consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable, which, when written as a tetrameter, makes the sound of galloping hooves”. But that doesn’t make him savvy in all areas of his life. As he bumbles into unfolding chaos in the senior ranks at Peck & Peck, he must try to score a promotion, appease his parents and improve his romantic prospects. For the new novel, Garmus realised she needed to investigate the world of poetry. “I am not a huge poetry person. I went into it kicking and screaming, thinking, ‘I’m not sure this should be my centre point, but when I started researching it – it took six or eight months of intensive study – I realised, first of all, how little I knew of this art form. Second of all, how stunning it is. It’s like buried treasure. For one of the most overlooked, underloved art forms, it packs one of the strongest punches you can find in the art world.” The best new books to look out for in autumn 2026 Surprisingly, for a novel that is so consumed with poetry, there is very little poetry in the book. “I had a poem from Seamus Heaney in the book and I had trouble getting permission for it, so I had to take it out,” she says ruefully. “I didn’t realise this about poetry, but if you use one line you have to get permission for it. I’m a huge fan of his. It really hurt to take his [poem] out. I also had to take out Carl Sandburg and [Charles] Bukowski, it was a nightmare.” Instead, the novel is peppered with references to poems, from Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck to TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufock. There are also contemplations about the life of a poet (“The words, ‘I made a killing in poetry’, have never been uttered,” reflects Batter), and literary jokes: the slightly woo-woo WB Yeats is on a list of poets who must always receive an automatic rejection letter from Peck & Peck. Garmus keeps the tone uplifting and warm. “I want the books to be perceived as serious but fun,” she says. “In Lessons in Chemistry, I’m talking about misogyny. In Peck & Peck, I’m talking about conformity. I want to talk about serious topics but put some fun around it. I think it’s imperative that we keep our sense of humour. It’s sometimes the only way people will connect.” She’s talking about fiction, but she might as well be referring to the vogue for carefully skirting the fraught subject of US politics. Garmus has amassed considerable wealth since the publication of Lessons in Chemistry (to the extent that her two adult daughters changed her name in their phones from “Mum” to “global phenomenon”). She gives much of it to charities that kick against the Trump regime – Pen in the US (against book banning), Planned Parenthood (for safe and available abortions ) and “anything to preserve and help children’s lives around the world”. Benjamin Alire Sáenz: '‘As a former Catholic priest, I understood what it meant to have a calling to poetry’ Money hasn’t changed her, except to give her more latitude to be exactly as she is: low-key and low-maintenance. She gleefully recounts the story of a time on stage during a US book tour when she put her hand into her jacket pocket, the pocket ripped and her keys fell out on to the stage. “The moderator said: ‘Can’t we afford a new jacket?’,” she recalls with a laugh. “I wore my [male] publicist’s jacket after that. We didn’t have time to go shopping.” Generous with her time, Garmus is surprisingly candid for a global phenomenon. Of the Lessons in Chemistry adaptation, she doesn’t mince her words. “I got advice after I’d sold the book from some very famous authors. They reached out and said, ‘Okay, so now Hollywood has your book. So here’s what you do: you run the other way, you never turn around, you never look back.’ And of course I did turn around and I did look back, and that causes problems.’” What did she struggle with? “Oh like, they’re missing Six-Thirty or the rowing is completely wrong – that’s not how you erg. The tone was a little different. But I’m lucky to have it made. I’m grateful.” When it came time for her to write her second book, she says, there were publishing types who had a rinse-and-repeat version of Lessons in Chemistry on their vision board. She didn’t care. “With age, you already know what you’ve survived,” she says. “The fact that people want this win or that win, they want a very certain kind of story. That has no impact on me at all. I’m sure some of these people wish it did. I think they wanted me to write the sequel to Lessons in Chemistry and I said, ‘No, I’m writing something new’.” She smiles, and you can hear the spirit of Elizabeth Zott in her words. “I’m a copywriter. We never write the same thing twice.” Poem of the Week: Towards Rapture by Charlotte Buckley Peck & Peck is published by Manilla Press on October 13th