Hope Jahren

My rating for this book is a reflection not so much of my enjoyment of it as my acknowledgement of its importance. Hope Jahren is a successful female research scientist working within a STEM field that's still overwhelmingly male-dominated, a woman with mental illness who has been able to forge an academic career—voices like hers are too rarely heard in academia in general and STEM fields in particular. Jahren focuses less on the highs of her career (she's won multiple Fulbrights, for show more instance, but I'm not sure that she even mentions that in the book) than she does on the lows and even more so the monotonous middle: the antisocial hours spent doing repetitive prep work in the lab, the constant scrabble to secure funding, the gauntlet of aggressions (micro and macro) faced by women in academia.

However, for all Jahren's ability to be very upfront about her experiences (she clearly prides herself on her bluntness), Lab Girl is the kind of memoir that suffers from the author's lack of self-awareness. Although I'm not in a STEM field, I am a woman in academia, and so I'm quite familiar with other women (almost always white women) like Jahren: women for whom sexism is odious inasmuch as it affects them, but who care not one jot about systemic sexism or how it affects other women. Almost the only women to feature in the book are Jahren and her mother (who is treated with a hostility which I find inexplicable, given that nothing in the behaviour attributed to her seems particularly egregious or all that different from that ascribed to Jahren's beloved father), and I was almost surprised to end a book not having encountered a paragraph in which Jahren explains why she's Not Like the Other Girls.

More overtly jarring were Jahren's descriptions of her interactions with students and the means by which she "trains in" new graduate students. If these were the anecdotes she thought made her look like a competent instructor, I'm hoping her grad students have insurance which lets them access a good therapist—or failing that, that they have access to a steady supply of palatable beer. Don't haze your students! Don't pass on fucked-up measures of academic "worth" to students just because academia is messed up and most graduate advisors don't know pedagogical theory from a hole in the wall!

Listening to this as an audiobook was also a mistake. Jahren's talents are undoubtedly many, but acting out even her own words is not one she possesses. The vocal quivering and gulping she employed were distracting and maudlin; it was like listening to an audiobook from the Victorian period.

Listening to the audiobook version also made the section set in Ireland extra obnoxious to me (an Irishwoman), and retroactively made me question the trustworthiness of great swathes of the book. The most egregious example of this is when Jahren describes getting lost in Limerick City, and attributes this to the fact that all of the street signs are in Irish. (Now, I've heard Americans mangle Irish over the years, but never so comprehensively as Hope Jahren. I honestly asked myself if she'd just spoken in Klingon, had to go look up the text of the book on Google Books, and then shrieked at the realisation that she was trying to say "Sráid Eibhlín.) Here's the thing: street signs in Ireland are bilingual, with the English-language text generally appearing in larger font, and the Irish-language version smaller and in italics. There's no way that Jahren was lost and distractedly trying to figure out where "Sráid Eibhlín" was; she had to have known all along that she was on Ellen Street. This might seem like nitpicking, but such an obvious twisting of the truth—whether in service of a little bit of drama or getting an extra bit of comedy out of the Weird Irish—felt like the literary version of the bad scientific practice of p-hacking. show less

Part memoir, part scientific study involving geobiology, trees, grasses, mosses, flowers, plants and soil, Lab Girl is a scientific love story. The author clearly loves what she does for a living, whether it's teaching or building an entire lab from the ground up, or sharing her work with her platonic soul mate and co-scientist, Bill. The author's unflagging passion for her work is palpable. As she states toward the end of the book, "I will never stop being ravenously hungry for science no show more matter how well it feeds me."

Jahren's immersion in her work is interspersed with her personal history - from her childhood in Minnesota, to her her studies which take her to seemingly disparate places including California, Alaska, Georgia, Norway, Ireland and Hawaii, along with one very precarious cross-country road trip. Though only mentioned a few times, Jahren's experience with bipolar disorder is also part of her story.

Along with her experiences as a wife and first time parent, Lab Girl traverses both the head and heart of scientific exploration - the exhilaration, the meticulous hand's-on "dirty work", the inevitable pit falls, and the unequivocal love for the natural world and all its endless mysteries. Articulate, astute and enlightening, Lab Girl is a marvel. show less

Hope Jahren is a geobiologist, which, in her case, seems to involve doing a lot of studies on plants, and a lot of mass spectrometer experiments designed to figure out things about plants and their environments using isotope ratios.

In Lab Girl, she talks about various aspects of her life and her career: growing up in a family who seldom spoke to each other; the painstaking care with which she goes about doing science and the careless neglect that seems to have characterized much of her show more personal life; the struggles of scientists to get funding and her particular difficulties as a woman in science; her struggles with bipolar disorder; her somewhat strange but very deep connection with her lab assistant/bff; her love of plants; and the ways in which she has grown in her life.

She intersperses all of these personal musings with short, sometimes rather poetic descriptions of how plants grow and survive and reproduce. These chapters generally reflect in a metaphorical fashion on things in her own life, but she never pushes that so far it starts to feel artificial or cute. And they're kind of fascinating. I know they got me thinking in slightly new ways about the trees I pass every day on my way to work, almost without seeing them.

The writing is good, but a little odd, in a hard-to-describe way. It somehow feels simultaneously intimate and distancing, but maybe that's appropriate, because it very much reflects the sense you get of the author and her self-image. She does come across as a bit of a weird person (and her aforementioned research partner/best buddy even more so), but in an interesting way. Sometimes she made me laugh -- she and the people she surrounds herself with seem to be masters of expressing affection via humorous shit-talking -- and sometimes she made me roll my eyes at her a little -- seriously, lady, you should not need to experience a bad accident to know you should wear a seat belt! -- but she's definitely not boring. Even if she does capture very well the un-glamous tedium that is such a large part of scientific research and so seldom acknowledged. show less

This is a book about studying plants, but also and mostly a book about being a non-neurotypical woman finding her way in a still-often-hostile world while loving science beyond measure. She’s deeply, deeply weird in a way I recognize, with a knack for turning a phrase and some nice subtle uses of plant development to contrast with her own life story.