Lab Girl

Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl is part scientific memoir and part love letter to plants. Jahren is a geobiologist who has spent her career studying trees and the chemistry of how they live, and the book alternates between her own story and short, beautifully written chapters about plant biology that double as small essays on attention.

The through line is her decades-long working partnership with Bill, her lab manager and friend. The relationship is one of the strangest and most affecting in recent memoir, two people who built a working life together while staying mostly out of each other’s personal lives.

Jahren writes about the financial precarity of academic science, the indignities of being a woman in a male field, and the daily texture of fieldwork in places most of us will never see.

For readers who liked H Is for Hawk or any of Annie Dillard’s nature writing, this is essential.