Green obsession
Siobhan Harvey joins brilliant geobiologist Hope Jahren on an affecting, nerdy road trip.
Geobiologist, professor and mother Hope Jahren’s confronting memoir, Lab Girl offers a subtitle, A story of trees, science and love, which only partly begins to articulate the depths of the subject matter and theme the book possesses.
For though the work is undoubtedly a tale of dendrology, botany and passion, it’s actually much more than this: it’s a story of definition, self and scientific, and the difficulties of such classification. Therein, these become a symbol of a book which, in structure and subject seeks constantly to defy expectations.
If Jahren’s Lab Girl voices the quandaries of searching for meaning, the one definitive thing which can be said of it is, it’s an unconventional memoir. This is never more so than in the subject matter.
What begins as an authorial reflection on the past, particularly her childhood devotion to her physics teacher father and obsession with plants, grows into something more metaphorical and disturbing. The correlation between plant and body analysis; the author’s professorship at just 26; how her mania for botany spills into a darker unsettlement; a very difficult pregnancy: these and other incidents underscore the role of science as sanctuary and jeopardy, mental and emotional, in the author’s single-minded existence.
There’s also something compellingly creative about Jahren’s engagement with her narrative. As the mother of a highly gifted child, I found the author’s inventive arrangement of her passion for her profession rang many bells. If this is fervour sometimes to the point of self-destabilisation, Jahren’s organisation of her book reinforces the artistry she brings to her science.
For instance, rather than a chronological narrative, the typical fare of autobiographies, Jahren structures Lab Girl into three non-linear sections bookended by a prologue and epilogue.
This arrangement is framed by sections with ingenious titles such as ‘Roots and Leaves’ and ‘Flowers and Fruit’ rather than sequentially numerical chapters.
Fundamentally, Jahren presents her inventiveness less as a journey of scientific and academic insight than a global travel-fest to the world’s most intriguing botanical locations.
In field trip after field trip, she and her brilliant but faulted colleague-come-buddy Bill journey us from the midwest across America, to Norway, Ireland, the North Pole and Hawaii as they endlessly strive for professional and personal understanding. Consequentially, the road trip genre is given a new, nerdy lease of life.
Confessionals of this nature can emotionally and intellectually wow readers while simultaneously reinforce, in their lack of technical craft and simplicity of explication, the awkwardness of their novice authors.
Not Lab Girl. Affecting, nonlinear, thematically-layered and linguistically adept, Jahren’s selfportrait of constant struggle and unconventional mania resists easy categorisation, and is a richer, more fulfilling read because of that.