Lessons in Chemistry(2022); Bonnie Garmus.Photo:Doubleday Canada; Dain Rhys Evans
Doubleday Canada; Dain Rhys Evans
Bonnie Garmusstruck a gold mine withLessons in Chemistry, but it didn’t happen until she was 65 years old. And that’s okay with her.
In fact, she tells PEOPLE that her first novel, which predated 2022’sLessons in Chemistry,“got rejected 98 times” for being “too long,” at 700 pages.
Asked what advice she’d give to others who feel like it might be too late in life to get a book published for the first time, Garmus, now 66, tells PEOPLE: “Age will never matter when you’re a writer, because no one ever sees you.”
“You might be on the back cover, but no one really cares how old you are. We read dead people all the time. I mean, you read Dickens, and he’s dead,” she adds. “It just doesn’t matter.”
Lessons in Chemistry(2022).Doubleday Canada
Doubleday Canada
The California-born Seattle native and mother of two, who now lives in London, also advises would-be published authors “to stop telling yourself that it’s too late and instead say to yourself, ‘It’s time.’ "
“Sometimes you just need to kind of let that experience grow in your brain,” she explains. “I’m a writer. I was writing all day for my work. The last thing you want to come home and do is write.”
For more from Bonnie Garmus, pick up the latest issue ofPEOPLE, on newsstands now, or subscribehere.
“I’m not a chemist, and I am a terrible cook,” she says. “I wrote my role model. I would like to be more like her.”
But while she and Elizabeth might not share many surface-level interests, the accomplished author is a big proponent ofa message that her protagonistperfectly embodies.
“Only you know who you are, and who you want to become or what you want to do,” she says. “Yet there are all these roadblocks, especially a lot of societal and cultural roadblocks, to that. But don’t let someone’s rejection of your material or of you be the thing that guides you. Let you be the thing that guides you, that you decide, [for] your own future.”
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source: people.com
