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Summary
Chapters 1-5
Chapter 1, November 1961
In the Southern California town of Commons, Elizabeth Zott, a thirty-year-old mother, wakes early, feeling miserable. Despite this, she prepares her five-year-old daughter Mad's lunch and includes several notes encouraging her to learn, to play sports fairly but not automatically let the boys win, and to remember that most people are awful. Mad, a prodigious early reader who prefers to conceal her abilities in order to fit in, stores these notes away secretly. She waits in bed to do her morning routine with Elizabeth, who then leaves for her job as the star of a cooking show, "Supper at Six."
Chapter 2, Pine
Elizabeth is discovered as a TV show host in unusual circumstances: it’s due to her daughter's stolen lunches. Mad gives her lunches to a girl called Amanda Pine in exchange for her friendship, as Mad’s classmates find her weird. Elizabeth becomes suspicious when Mad rapidly begins losing weight, and goes to speak to Amanda’s father. Elizabeth angrily confronts Walter Pine at a TV studio about the thievery. She’s just there to discuss lunch, but he’s utterly captivated by her. He can’t believe that she isn’t already on TV, but she crisply clarifies that she's a chemist and mother with no interest in a television career. Not in the least dissuaded, Walter sets about persuading her to run a program for him. She needs money and Walter needs better ratings, and so their meeting eventually leads to the creation of Elizabeth's cooking show "Supper at Six." Elizabeth becomes a no-nonsense TV star, and her program quickly draws national attention.
Chapter 3, Hastings Research Institute
In January 1952, the highly renowned chemist Calvin Evans is working at Hastings Research Institute in Commons. Despite his brilliance, he’s known to harbor grudges. For example, he hates Harvard because they rejected him as an undergrad. Calvin’s a genius, but his introversion and his single-minded passion for rowing often leave him isolated. Calvin's love life is as awkward as he is, and he’s horribly unsuccessful with women, even though he’s a very eligible bachelor given his fame and success. One Tuesday at Hastings, Elizabeth Zott ignores all the safety signs he’s posted and enters Calvin’s lab to requisition beakers. Calvin, mistaking Elizabeth for a secretary, dismisses her, but she argues with him and takes the beakers anyway. After a couple of encounters outside Hastings—in one of which Calvin vomits all over her—the two begin to develop feelings for one another.
Chapter 4, Introduction to Chemistry
As they leave work, Calvin and Elizabeth, argue over the details of protein synthesis. Calvin is frustrated because he’s very attracted to Elizabeth but doesn’t know how she feels about him. Elizabeth, who does in fact reciprocate his crush, quickly leaves each meeting they schedule to avoid kissing him. In the parking lot, after both pretend to have weekend plans, Elizabeth confronts Calvin about his unfriendly attitude toward her. He insists he's not the problem, and in a blazing moment of emotional clarity, Elizabeth leans out of her car window and kisses him.
Chapter 5, Family Values
Colleagues at Hastings assume that Calvin and Elizabeth are together because he’s famous and she’s beautiful. They’re wrong: the two are astonishingly intellectually compatible, and also great friends. They quickly begin to spend all their time together. One night after they have sex they talk about Thanksgiving plans, each revealing that they have no family to visit. Elizabeth talks haltingly about her origins in Oregon, and Calvin mentions his in Iowa. They discuss their different but similarly lonely upbringings and tragic family losses. Elizabeth’s father was a religious con artist, and her brother committed suicide when their father rejected him for being gay. Calvin’s parents died in a train accident, and he hesitantly reveals that he was abused in the Catholic boys’ home where he grew up.
Analysis
In these initial chapters, we’re introduced to the novel’s protagonist Elizabeth, to a brief snapshot of her life in the 1960s including her TV show, and to her love interest Calvin Evans. Elizabeth is lonely as she makes her daughter’s lunch, leaving little notes that her daughter will keep but hides from her classmates. Mad Zott, the daughter in question, thinks of her “permanently depressed” mother as an example of why fitting in is important. Elizabeth refuses to act conventionally, but instead of being inspiring, Mad finds her embarrassing. She knows that her mother’s TV show is socially important, but she wishes she had a more normal family life. Elizabeth underscores the abnormality of their unusual situation in the next chapter, when the novel flashes back to her first meeting with the producer Walter Pine. She bursts into Pine’s office on a mission to stop his daughter Amanda from taking Mad’s food. She’s concerned that Mad is growing thin, because one of the only ways Elizabeth knows how to nurture her daughter is by providing her with exactly the right amount of calories to grow and maintain her weight. She tells Pine that they “both know food is the catalyst that unlocks our brains, binds our families, and determines our futures.” While he might not see a carefully prepared meal as an important thing, Elizabeth feels that it’s a crucial element of her bond with Mad.
Pine doesn’t treat her like an annoyed mother, however, nor is he paying attention to her theories on food and bonding. Like most people, he’s having trouble listening to her because startled by her beauty, thinking “[s]he was stunning. He was literally stunned by her.” When she enters, he thinks she must be “auditioning for something” rather than acting as a concerned mother. Even people who treat Elizabeth with respect and kindness in a professional setting are affected by her physical appearance. She’s a beautiful woman, so people want her around. On the other hand, of course, she’s a beautiful woman, so people don’t take her work seriously and dismiss her accomplishments.
The narrative abruptly jumps back in time ten years, to 1952. Having foreshadowed Elizabeth’s future woes, the author spends the majority of the beginning of the novel introducing the reader to Calvin Evans and describing how he and Elizabeth fall in love. Their first interactions are a comedy of errors, a series of mistakes that bind them together An awkward, clumsy man, Calvin means well but doesn’t express himself effectively. To this point, he makes the painful faux pas of assuming Elizabeth is a secretary when she bursts in to take some supplies from his office. Elizabeth doesn’t like this at all, as she “did not care for people who made assumptions based on…long-outdated physical clues.” The next time the two meet doesn’t go any better: Calvin is having a bad reaction to the perfume his date is wearing, and he vomits all over Elizabeth. The two begin a working relationship as they discover their research is usefully related, which quickly evolves into a mutual crush that neither shy scientist knows how to express. Elizabeth finally breaks the ice by kissing Calvin, which “cement[s] a permanent bond that even chemistry could not explain.” Although their colleagues assume Calvin and Elizabeth are dating for superficial reasons, they’re head-over-heels for each other.
This lovely relationship with a male colleague is the opposite of Elizabeth’s experience elsewhere as a female chemist. Indeed, just before her second meeting with Calvin, she overhears a conversation which causes her to have a flashback to a deeply traumatic event in her life. Standing outside her lab, she hears her male co-workers talking, including her boss, Robert Donatti. He calls her a “c*nt” and agrees with the others that “she’s not that smart” and that “she needs to be put in her place.” It’s not the first time Elizabeth has been called that word. The narrative jumps back in time again two years, to a flashback of when Elizabeth was raped by Dr. Meyers, the man supervising her graduate research. At UCLA, like at Hastings, Elizabeth is also forced to “endur[e] the day to day degradations…the touches, the lewd comments, the rank suggestions” silently. When Meyers rapes her, she fights back by stabbing him with a pencil, and her time at UCLA is cut short when his crime is dismissed and she is let go. When she returns to the present, she’s sickened by the fact that history seems to be repeating itself. She knows, however, that there’s little she can do but ignore it as best she can.
