This is the first book I've pre-ordered for a long time, based on reading Hope Jahren's blog (#HopeJahrenSureCanWrite - an accurate name) and interviews on various media.
I was not disappointed.
The first thing that struck me is that this reads more like a novel than a straight memoir in that her use of language is similar to that you would find in literature and the events related seem to be picked more with a novelist's eye to revealing the characters and their motivation than to, say a journalist's eye for narrative.
My previous benchmark for a book about life in biology labs is [b:Natural Obsessions: Striving to Unlock the Deepest Secrets of the Cancer Cell|23825157|Natural Obsessions Striving to Unlock the Deepest Secrets of the Cancer Cell|Natalie Angier|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1438557140s/23825157.jpg|43437374], but Natalie is a journalist and writes that way. I prefer Lab Girl and will recommend it even to people not interested in science because it will be a "good read", whereas you have to have a good deal of interest in a life in science to read Angier, but they're a good pair if you are so interested.
Lab Girl is also interesting to me because Hope Jahren is such an unusual (and talented) person. She would have had to be to shoulder her way into a white male-dominated profession. This is also the story of Hope and Bill, Bill being an equally unusual man with complementary talents, as they work together over a very long time as they find ways to find out what plants are up to.
The biographical chapters are interspersed with some fascinating facts about plants. I'm a plant person myself, though mostly from the gardening point-of-view but I have done undergraduate-level study of plants so there wasn't a lot new to me except the "putting in perspective" parts where she tells us, for example, how much paper you would get from a medium-sized tree's leaves, or how much magnesium you need to make their chlorophyll. But Hope's prose poetry on even the things I know were a pleasure to read.
I've never really wanted to be a lab scientist. This book convinced me I wouldn't want to be - my personality doesn't fit that well. However, there were so many other touch points with my own unusual life, things we've done both important and trivial (e.g. we both read Jean Genet at about the same age, both moved countries and cities several times in pursuit of life goals) and ways we look at things that provoked a shock of recognition, that it helped me think about my own life in new ways, and what I might try next as I look for yet another change in career.
You will do yourself a big favour if you read this.