A conversation with the bestselling novelist Bonnie Garmus
"I really had no idea how much people would care about my age. It’s the last thing that matters in writing. What does matter is working at the craft."
Bonnie Garmus is something of a marvel — a writer who, after a long international career as a copywriter in California, Switzerland and UK, published her first novel Lessons In Chemistry at the age of 64. The manuscript sold in a 16-way auction, published to near-unanimous critical acclaim and landed on bestseller lists on both side of the Atlantic. Since then Garmus has been characterised as an outlier in the press and while she is an unusual talent, I worry this narrative misses the point of her success. As she herself is quick to point out, her story as a writer, is actually nothing new. She’s less a “break out” anomaly, than a study in the power of persistence — specifically, the hard-won experience that comes from the tireless, meticulous work of arranging and rearranging words on the page.
The work of a writer is, for the most part, quiet, painstaking and quotidian. We type, we delete, we cut, we paste, we type and type, then delete and type again. And there are many of us who, like Garmus, spend decades honing our craft in one commercial form or another (be it journalism, corporate writing, ghosting, academic stuff, copy for the back of cereal boxes, celebrity Instagram captions — whatever). And while earning our keep, many writers are also privately attempting to master another (often more creative and less securely remunerative) form. But the divide between these two kinds of labour is overstated. Just as pausing at a creative impasse to take a walk or bake a pie is part of ‘the work’ so is the writing we do to pay the bills.
Viewed in this way, Garmus is a refreshing antidote to the myth that those of us who work in journalism or commercial/technical writing are in danger of wasting our talent or sapping the creative impulse through more pragmatic technical pursuits. In my experience (and in Garmus’s), all writing begets better writing — it’s as simple as that. If you aspire to be a poet, not only is there is no shame in writing press releases to put food on the table — chances are it will help.
Before Lessons in Chemistry, Garmus, like J.K. Rowling, Douglas Stuart and countless others before her, had years of false starts in her fiction. These included at least one unpublished novel that was sent out and rejected almost one hundred separate times. And while it’s true that eking out a career as a novelist or a screenwriter, say, is more challenging than finding work as a speech writer or a magazine editor, the latter are hardly unskilled labour. Every form of writing is exceedingly difficult to execute to a high standard. All of it requires patience, persistence and skill. To master one form in a career is an enormous accomplishment, but to master two or more requires a rare mixture of self-belief and self-criticism, combined with a quiet unflinching power of will.
In our interview, Garmus and I discuss just this — the importance of what she calls “working at the craft,” the hard thankless graft of trying and failing and trying again, through which a writer slowly gets better bit by bit. Copy-writing, she explains, taught her to “think broadly but write concisely,” an invaluable skill for any aspiring novelist. So yes, while Lessons In Chemistry is Garmus’s first published work, it is also, more crucially the culmination of years of experience and labour on the page. This is just one of the lessons we can — and should — take from both her extraordinary story and book.