Women in science in fiction with Laura Elvery

In this episode, Jess chats with Laura Elvery about her new collection of short stories, 'Ordinary Matter,' which is inspired by the twenty women who have won the Nobel Prize for science. You can purchase 'Ordinary Matter' here: https://bit.ly/3FP983B

Laura Elvery is one of Australia’s most beloved short story writers. She has won the Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature, the Margaret River Short Story Competition, the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and the Fair Australia Prize for Fiction, and has been published in Meanjin, Overland, The Saturday Paper, Island, Australian Financial Review, The Big Issue Fiction Edition and Griffith Review.

Cheat Sheet (texts mentioned)
Madame Curie: A Biography by  Ève Curie
Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres by Catherine Brady

The Science Write Now (SWN) Podcast is a 3x/monthly podcast for people who love science and the arts. If you’re interested in learning more about great books, plays, and films; writing, research or editing; the lives of scientists; and creative insights into contemporary science … then you’ve come to the right place!

The SWN Podcast is hosted by Amanda Niehaus and Jessica White and produced by Taylor Mitchell with funding from the Australia Council for the Arts.

You can also find and follow us online - on Twitter - on Instagram - and on Facebook! 

Our opening song is 'Balmain' by Pure Milk: https://www.triplejunearthed.com/artist/pure-milk.html

Transcript

Jessica: Hello everyone, my name is Jessica White and I'm one half of the duo that makes up Science Write Now, and the other half is writer and scientist Amanda Niehaus. I'd like to acknowledge the First Nations people as the traditional custodians of the land from which I'm speaking, so that's the Jagera and the Turrbal people in Meanjin, Brisbane, and to pay my respects to Elders past, present, and emerging. Science Write Now is an online platform devoted to publishing and promoting creative forms of science writing that includes fiction, memoir, poetry, personal essay and experimental forms. We also interview writers who use science in their work and today I'm very happy to be interviewing Laura Elvery.

Laura's our first writer who we're interviewing and her new collection 'Ordinary Matter' - here we are, can you see that with the jellyfish? There we go - yeah - will be released on the 1st of September. Laura has published a previous collection of stories, 'Trick of the Light' and she's won several short story prizes in Australia and her work is published in Griffith Review, Saturday Paper, Meanjin and Overland and she has a PhD in creative writing and literary studies and she lives in Brisbane. So welcome, Laura! Thanks, thanks for speaking to me today and congratulations on this beautiful book - it's just - I just loved it.

Laura: Thank you Jessica so it's a, it's a collection of short stories inspired by women who've won the Nobel Prize and you've written 20 stories and you begin with Marie Curie in 1903 and you end with Francis Arnold in 2018. And, when you first told me about this book - I think I ran into you at some launch at Avid Reader and asked what you -

Laura: Remember, Remember launches at Avid Reader?

Jessica I remember - those things where you could actually be with people in the same room. 

Laura : I remember - yes I did run into you. 

Jessica:  Yeah, I asked you what you were working on, and you said, 'Oh, women in science and the Nobel Prize.' I thought, oh man, my god that's so exciting and then I just assumed that you would be writing biographies - fictional biographies of these women - and then when I started reading it I was thinking where's ... where's ... where's the biographies? So and then - and then - I was like oh! this is even more interesting - you're not writing about the women themselves, although there's definitely fictional biographies in there, you're talking about how these scientific discoveries affect the lives of everyday people, and you talk about, um, mothers, wives and daughters and how science is in their everyday life, um, I think that's one of the loveliest things about the book - I guess it's ordinary, it's ordinary like the matter in our everyday lives. But where did the idea come from? I'm sure you're going to get asked this many times, but it was a really, really interesting concept. 

Laura: Thank you, Jess, and you're right about the fictional biographies, as inI remember doing an early grant application for, um, for this project and I was encouraged to really explain how this was not um fictional biographies. I did, I did have, I did have a thought that it might be at the very beginning and I remember going to my writer's group in the early days, um, on the early days of this project where I sort of laid out for them, 'Okay what ... what could it be?' because my writer's group is that sort of place where we brainstorm ideas, and I'd had this idea based on 'Trick of the Light' where the title story is about the radium girls who,  in places all over America, but especially in someone like New Jersey, were in these factories. They had these radium mixtures that were glow in the dark. And so they sat in these lines and these quite well-paid jobs for women at the time. And they painted these watch faces and compass dials with this radium mixture. And a lot of history podcasts have covered this. And so I wrote a story about a girl who worked there. We know she's doomed, as those women were. And a lot of them developed really severe illnesses within a really short space of time. The managers didn't touch the stuff because they knew it was probably a bit dangerous. So, I always liked that story, the title story from Trick of the Light, and it seemed to be a story that readers really liked as well. And in that the main character touches on Marie Curie, although she doesn't call her by name—she says the lady in France.

 And then I think I was trying to come up with another idea for a project for a grant application, which is what I do sometimes. Like, I need an idea for something. I need another idea. Let's write something and figure it out later. And I came back to this idea of Marie Curie and I kind of wanted to return to it, but in a different way. And somehow I got interested in this Nobel Prize idea because of Marie Curie. And then I found out that there's one Australian woman. And that was the moment I had never heard of her. Elizabeth Blackburn, born in Tasmania. She's still alive, works in America. I'd never heard of her. I thought that was remarkable. How had I not heard of this woman? And I soon discovered, you know it's six hundred and fifty men have won Nobel Prizes in the sciences, in chemistry, physics and medicine or physiology, and 20 times women have been awarded it. And so at the time when I first had the idea, the book would have been 18 stories long and then in 2018, Donna Strickland from Canada and Francis Arnold from the US won. And so I added two more stories and then I had to, no more! No more women, no (laughter). So that's sort of how it came about. And so it just sort of fell into... OK, I'll do one for each of these women. And what I was saying about the writers group is I felt really restricted at the start about what should these stories look like? And I got really... I tied myself in knots a little bit, I think, where I thought they had to be, you know, I said to them, do they all have to be set in the year that they won the prize? And my writers group was like, "no!" Do they all need to feature the woman? And they said, "no, don't do that either." You know, do they all need to be three thousand words? "No!" And so as soon as I, I feel very... I'm very easily influenced. I felt the texture of it a little bit better. Like, there's one in there that's twelve and a half thousand words and one that's probably about fifteen hundred words. And the women appear sometimes. Other times they don't appear at all. And that was a really deliberate choice. And as soon as I made that, it felt really freeing to be like, OK, that's the book that I want to write is the book that I have written.

Jessica: That's amazing. And it shows how collaborative the writing process is.

Laura: That's a nice way of putting it. Collaborative, not easily influenced. I'm like tell me what to do. Collaborative, yes!

Jessica: And science is collaborative as well. Yeah. I was talking to my partner—he's trained as an ecologist but studying philosophy—and he was saying, well the Nobel Prize is kind of given to the top researcher, but there's a whole team behind them doing that work and writing is the same way. It's never just you writing the book. Everyone, doing the editing, giving it feedback and pulling you in different directions. 

Laura: Yeah, definitely.

Jessica: So when you got to writing the science, how did you go about researching that or putting it in when you wanted to put it in or not put it in? And was it too hard sometimes to include? 

Laura: Well, short answer is yes, because I'm not a scientist, Jess as you would know. I mean, I but I also had to let myself off the hook in the early days of that as well, because I was getting a bit tied in knots. I'm not a scientist, but as my husband reminds me, like I did a PhD for four years. So I've done research and I love researching for fiction. So I knew that this was a project that I mean, I did science in high school but I'm not a scientist, but I just find many, many facets of it interesting. And I read a lot of books about science and probably more from a you know, bookshop science books sort of thing. But I mean, so for some for some of them, like Elizabeth Blackburn, the Australian woman, there's a great biography by Catherine Brady about her that that was sort of a starting point, actually, that biography. Marie Curie's daughter wrote a great biography of Curie called Madame Curie. And it's just so beautifully written. It's an outstanding book told in a really interesting way about her. So even from my answers, you can tell that I am really interested in the relationships and the lives, perhaps more than getting my head around the science. So I've got friends who are scientists and they would field a lot of questions from me on text message. So, that that part of it is the harder part for me, but also the part that I found really fascinating — trying to understand. Gerty Cori is the fourth woman in the book. She won in 1947. Her and her husband Carl, and sort of trying to understand the Cori cycle. And you know, something that might take you a short amount of time to understand takes me, my brain... But I'm very curious about it. So I'm interested enough to see what she did and what their work kind of means at a level that I could understand. And the same with Donna Strickland, who won in 2018 for optical, she's an optical physicist. You know, this stuff, to be honest, really does go over my head at a pure science level. But I'm so curious about it and so interested in finding out that the times when I could put that into a story was really quite joyful and a challenge for me.

Jessica: Yeah. That's really cool, because what we're trying to do with this website is promote the kind of, you know, joyful encounters that you have. I'm not great with science either, but I notice writers keep doing this. They say, "ah, I'm not a scientist, but."   And I've spoken to other writers and they're very careful to say, "we're don't we're not scientists, we're not trained." But it's something to do with coming to it and not knowing anything. You find out stuff which is really exciting. It's really creative when you encounter a new discipline. 

Laura: And having people around me who I can ask and I mean, I'm writing this book in 2018, 2019 when I can hear about something that a person has done and google it immediately. And because I do understand, you know, how to research certain things, I can follow a little rabbit hole and I have it all at my fingertips and I can find out whatever I want to know. So I feel lucky in that sense that things are there for me to find out if I wanted to find out. But for some of them, for some of those stories, it was even just a line in a biography or a line that a person had said about that woman, and that became the whole story.  

Jessica: Wow.

Laura: And my science research probably stopped at that point for a few of the stories. That was enough for me. I was off, kind of thing. I had what I needed and I was running. 

Jessica: Yeah

Laura: And for others, I would have spent more time researching them than I did even writing the story. So it was a bit of both, really.

Jessica:That's really interesting. Just going back to what we were talking about earlier with the numbers of women who have won the Nobel Prize... I think it's about 3%, and about half of them in the last 20 years... Since 2000, Because they've realised it's probably a bit problematic.

Laura: It took sixty years for the first physics prize to be won and only two years for two men to win it or something. There's only three physicists who have ever won it 60 years apart. Yeah, it has taken a long time. 

Jessica: Yeah. Was that at the fore of your mind as you started the project or is it something that became apparent to you as you did your research? 

Laura: Look, the first three were people from the Curie family. So Marie, then she won it again in 1911 and then Irène, her daughter. So for 30 years, the three women who'd won were from the same family until 1947. And so I think Jess, I can't really remember. You know how you can't really remember where the first point was... But my instinct says that I was surprised by the low numbers. At that time, it was 17 women, 18 times, like I said. I was very surprised at that and surprised that Elizabeth Blackburn was the only Australian woman in any field, including literature. So I remember being surprised by that.  

Jessica: Yeah, because everyone knows Patrick White. 

Laura:But all but two of the women are from Europe or America. So there's one Chinese woman, one Australian woman, you know, so it's just so narrow. It is so narrow. But as you said, more and more like in 2009, two women shared the prize, Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider.  Ada Yonath won it for chemistry that year as well. And the literature prize was won by Herta Müller.  I’m not sure... don't know about trends... And I've become really interested in the Nobel Prize as an institute. And I went to… I was really lucky to be in Stockholm in December, and I went to the Nobel Prize Museum over the couple of days in December when the prize is handed out on stage in Stockholm, which was magical. I didn't go, but I was on the outside. So I've become really interested in how the prize was set up. And I'm sure it's not the be all and end all for scientists, but it's sort of one of those traditions that I find really fascinating to look at.  

Jessica: And meant your mention of Stockholm made me think of the story about Rosalyn Yalow. The story called 'Stockholm' I thought was wonderful. And I was it was set in 1977. So I was really interested in how you're describing the clothes because I'm obsessed with fashion. So it came through really clearly. I was like, 'how can I look at what time period it is by looking at it?'  And I got a bit of a sense. 

Laura: The good thing about Google is, you can see what Rosalyn Yalow wore to the Nobel Prize ceremony in seventy-seven. And I have been to that hotel that where all the winners stay every single year. That hotel books out two nights or three nights. And when I was there in December I pretended I just walked into the hotel and pretended I needed something from the Grand Hotel Stockholm. So you get all the details that you can find out before you go, and then after you go, I love all those. That sort of research is really enjoyable to me.  

Jessica: And it came through because the use of detail is really precise and spot on. So it's very evocative. Yeah. But at the end of that story, you're talking about Rosalyn and there's this very quotidian thought,  'Ah, I've got to make sure my husband's got his black socks for the ceremony,' and then it goes into the sexism again, which is probably one of the few times that you mention it. I just wanted to read it because I was really struck that I wanted to ask you about it. So you write at the end of that story, 'winning does not mean only joy will follow. Winning does not stop sadness. You have to be tougher than all that and forget the faceless men from your past who failed to have faith in you, who pointed out that you were indeed a woman and not a good bet to join their program, their hospital, their team. To be obsessed with fairness, with what is owed. Well, that mustn't enter into it. Not today, certainly not tomorrow. Focus on all the luck you have received; polish it like a coin'. And that seemed very truthful to me. So I was wondering, how did you arrive at that understanding of what it must feel like to be a woman in science? 

Laura: Laura: Well, Rosalyn Yalow I found really interesting because for a few of the women who I research, what I'm hoping they'll desperately say is 'I'm a feminist,' in a really powerful, strong way, but that's me projecting onto them. So Rosalyn Yalow and a few of the others are a bit more circumspect about it, I think. Or were. Rosalyn Yalow's completely fascinating. She really did take her newborn baby to the lab breastfeeding within a week or two of his birth. But she also, by my research, was a very traditional wife in a Jewish family. Her expectations of it... and I think there's a line that another character in that book says that she was one in a class of four, one woman in a cost of four hundred men, I think that's the story, where her attitude towards it seemed to be both working your absolute guts out in the lab, but still—or and still—preparing a meal for your husband and looking after your children at home. Great, terrific. She managed to do both, but it is very interesting to me how... I expect someone who has been denied roles, been the only woman in a class of 400 or a job of 400 men to be a certain way, the way that I might react to that, which is outrage, you know, fury, which is sort of my go-to sometimes. But she wasn't like that, so I really did feel a sincere need to as best I could—when the women do appear in the stories, which is not every story like I said she does in 'Stockholm'—to be as faithful to their attitudes, as I think they would be—which is Roslyn's still going, 'does my husband have his socks? I'm looking forward to seeing my husband when he returns to the hotel.'  All of which is fine. She's a fictional character, but I felt like that is probably fairly truthful in the sense of what she might have been like in 1977.

Jessica: Yeah. Because the research really... I could really see you working hard to put all these stories together without and —where your research lightly — because that's a really hard thing for a writer to do. 

Laura: Oh, good. 

Jessica: How did you do the research? Because you're across a lot of time periods. So there's 1911 to the 21st century and you and are in a lot of different cultures and a lot of different environments. So the one about frost, I could feel that frost and I could hear it and I could sense how cold it was. So how did you do that kind of work, especially the sensory work of imagining those environments?  

Laura: Yes. So 'Frost,' Dorothy Hodgkin's story, is a little bit of a favourite of mine. I really enjoyed writing that one. It's a bit of an odd story, I think. It's set in the early part of 1985 where I'm assuming—there's a real portrait of Dorothy Hodgkin that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery and a British painter painted her—and I felt like setting it in the winter, partly to do a little bit with the fact that she did X-ray crystallography and there are parts of that science that hark back to when she was interested in patterns and snowflakes. So that research sort of... Very much like a magpie, like you research x-ray crystallography and information about snowflakes comes up and information about mosaics and patterns come up. And we know that Dorothy Hodgkin had an interest as a child in mosaics and patterns. Often that sort of work was seen as women's science—patterns, textiles, not real science. So I was interested in that, and so I thought an interesting way to set it would be when it's snowing, you know, when it's cold. She got arthritis at a really young age, so I thought her hands might be in a bit more pain when this painter is asking her to sit still for quite a while for this portrait. I thought, what are some things that might add to the texture of the story? It's cold. Her hands are sore. Maggi Hambling spent quite a bit of time at the beach, so I have her trying to reminisce about the whole village that she doesn't know to do this portrait as a commission, but perhaps she's interested in going to the beach again soon.  Whether it's me being subconscious about things that complicate a story or things that add little layers just to be fun—like the little snowflake thing—that's just me having a bit of... That'll be another little layer that I know about, and I guess you know about it, but you know that that I know about! 

Jessica: I noticed you doing that a lot now because I'm not great at short stories. I'm better at longer forms. But it was never the main point that you were addressing in the story that you always came at at a tangent. And I thought that was very clever. Or there was some other knot that tied together at the end, but it was not necessarily related to the story. I thought that was really clever. 

Laura: That's actually a deliberate thing. Coming at it from a tangent I'm very interested in this might be the whole story... Like Maria Mayer's story when she worked on the Manhattan Project. So she's the second physicist, 60 years, give or take, after Marie Curie. And so she's working and she worked on the Manhattan Project. And I thought, I don't want to write that story, but there are all these other periphery stories, these other women who are working during the Manhattan Project but had no idea what they were working on, did not know that their work was contributing to the atom bomb that would be dropped on Japan. They didn't know exactly what their roles were.But for some of these women, these little villages popped up that, you know, supplied all these other war efforts... there were great jobs, they were in the middle of nowhere, they were quickly built. They must have been fun for some of these women. And so that, coming at it at a tangent is a deliberate thing that I often do. I'm not that interested in that big story of the Manhattan Project today, but I reckon I'm interested in making up a woman and researching Los Alamos or Oak Ridge or one of those other sort of satellite places that was set up for the war effort. 

Jessica: Yeah, I think that makes for a much more interesting story anyway.  

Laura: I do

Jessica: We know the big stories like the war stories. So I'm of a similar mind to you. I think it's more to attend to the things that people don't really listen to properly or think about carefully because they're on the periphery.

Laura: And there are thousands of these women. And potentially after this job—just like the girls in the radium stories who had not worked at a job like this before—I think a lot of those people perhaps after Oakridge and Los Alamos and those sorts of places... maybe, maybe they didn't work anymore after that in that field. Maybe they did return to a sort of a more traditional life. But For those few years, that's pretty exciting. So you can make up a woman for whom that was a reality. 

Jessica: Yeah. I'm just returning to your previous point about mothers and daughters and the Curies. There are a lot of relationships between mothers and daughters and children in your book. Like, that's that's the point that you're at the moment. So obviously, it's going to feed in. We were talking earlier about needing to find this space. 

Laura: I mean, I'm in my parents’ walk-in wardrobe while they look after my child outside because they've got great sound.... and dad's shirts, he'll be horrified. But he set up a table because, yes, this is how you get a podcast done. You come to your parents' house. 

Jessica: Jessica: Yeah. It's a 21st century set up. Yep. And so I was really struck by that story, 'Something Close to Gold.' I thought it was... I thought it was beautiful. But you talk in the notes at the end, which I made sure I didn't reference the explanatory notes until I had read everything (but then I was tempted to just so I could see what the connections were). But I wanted to try and work it out on my own first. But at the end of that, you talk about Irène Joliot-Curie who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. I'll just read the notes because that's better than me trying to put it into my own words. And there you talk about how she shared the prize with Frédéric Joliot, who was her first... first her student and then her husband. And together they experimented on polonium, boron, aluminium and magnesium. And their work resembled alchemy, transforming one element into another. And the sense I got from this story is that the alchemy happens when you have a baby and it changes your mind. And that incredible bond between parent and child—and particularly mothers because of the chemicals in your body—is like magic. But the story jumps into the speculative. It was kind of science fiction. So I was wondering what made you change the register? Because a lot of your stories are fictional and some of them have this kind of speculative edge, but not many. So I was wondering what made you talk about that story? They find the baby on the beach and then they've got to call up a particular government organisation to see whether — 

Laura: That's s a good question, Jess. I won't say I don't know. I'll try to think about it. That first part of the story I ended up cutting. I remember sitting down, I had a bit of time by myself and I had a voice of a character in my mind. And the voice of the character was someone who had a real chip on his shoulder at that point in time and was feeling really as though the universe just wouldn't let up on her and was quite negative, but in a sort of a funny way—I just had a character idea. So I set this first scene at a doctor's office where all these things had been going wrong. In this instance, it's fertility treatment. And then I remember fleshing that out as a bit of a character sketch. So I had the character before I had the plot—totally before I had the plot. I just had her in a doctor's office getting some bad news about not falling pregnant. And then that that sort of fed into the plot. That first scene when I gave it to a writers group ended up being caught totally and was just informed by a bit of a line about their doctor. To be really truthful, I really think the character has had some bad news, she decides to go for a run, as I often do, if I feel like cheering myself up a bit. And as as best as I can remember, I really did just write it that she went for a run on the beach and you can just type the words 'and at the edge of the water, he heard a cry and there was a baby,' and suddenly you've got to figure out how and why, and I guess, like you said, register—and do pay a lot of close attention to, tone and register. OK, what register what tone is this story going to be? She finds a baby, but where am I going to take it? Like sometimes it really is like I'm typing it and it is a surprise to me that doesn't always happen. In a in a past story I have written... I have written for something at uni I remember writing about a found baby. I'd read a newspaper article about people who abandoned babies and found it. And so that subconsciously was there. And then in another story, in 'Trick of the Light', a boy gets a letter that's about 'if you found something call this number.'  So whether I'm like bringing that up myself... and then the other thing for that story that I was interested in doing—sometimes I have little goals for it—I was interested in, at that point, writing a story with a hopeful ending... With a happy ending, a straight up happy ending actually, I think. And so that's kind of a little goal to work towards. I'm running with this idea of it. Yes, it's a bit odd. There is not really a department that you call if you find a baby on a beach. Odd man on the other end of the line with that funny hold music that everyone gets. But if you have these little goals. Or that's what I had for that story, somehow this gets complicated. But by the end, what do I actually want to do to these two people? And sometimes it's harder, I think, to have a happy ending. I think you get really used to a sort of nihilistic ending for a short story. And so I've been trying to challenge myself with different ending or different types of endings. And that's what I was doing with 'Something Close to Gold.'  

Jessica: Yeah. And it's hard to do it without sounding trite as well. The ending. And how did does the story about Irène and her husband kind of influence the trajectory of that story?  

Laura: Yeah, I hadn't done a lot of research about them—although I ended up doing a bit more for Irène for the second story in the book, when Mary is there with her two daughters—so Irène and Frédéric, like Gerty Cori and Carl, just worked really closely together and like her parents before her. And so I just thought that was I thought that was fascinating. Working as a student, married in the lab every day, you know, Peter and Mary, Gerty and Carl Irène and Frédéric. And so I liked that fed into this character I'd created. She's unnamed in the she's first person in the story fed into this character who feels she's a bit unlovable except for this man who adores her.  Her focus is on him. His focus is on her. This chip, on her shoulder that she has comes from not really having many other friends, but partway through his story, she realises she no longer cares about that. So Irène and Frédéric, their biography came through in this idea of being so close to someone else, moving through these moments in time. Together, together, together.  

Jessica: Yeah, yeah. And I did get a strong sense of him as being a kind person. That was really nice. Yeah, but the mother daughter thing keeps appearing. And I think the place where it struck me quite strongly too was in the story 'Wingspan,'— quite a long story. And it's told from the point of view of Mom and Elizabeth, who becomes the Tasmanian scientist.  

Laura: Sort of, a version of Elizabeth. Not really her. 

Jessica: Yeah, but it knitted together. It reminded me of a double helix. The parent influences and the child influences the parent. [00:34:03][8.4]

Laura: I wish that's what I'd done. That wasn't it (laughs).

Jessica: That's alright you can say you did it! But yeah, I was really struck by how nurture encourages girls to become inspiring women. And sometimes it's not even nurture. Sometimes it's a drive because there was the woman who was cleaning, I think, was it in China, the woman who was cleaning the labs?  

Laura: Yes!

Jessica: Yes, that was extraordinary—she did the experiments in her spare time!

Laura: Yes! And with 'Wingspan' which is set in 1963, it's a parallel Elizabeth. It's a different family. She had more siblings in real life than what I've given. But my mum was as a teenager,  a child and a teenager, in the sixties. And so sometimes for those stories what I'm actually doing is asking my mum, 'can I ask you about what it was like to be a girl in the sixties and the seventies, and I'll just send her—my parents are so good I just send them random texts, I'm like, 'what did custard look like in the sixties?' anf they just answer, they just know it's for something. 'What did you put on your wall when you're a kid?' And they just answer it. And so sometimes I'm working through like I'd like to animate my mum's childhood or a version of it. I want to know more about a version of my grandmother in the sixties, what might that have looked like? She's different, different Tasmania, more middle class than my grandma...all those sorts of things. But it's almost like animating them a little bit. So sometimes it's sort of a selfish thing... what might they have said to each other, or what was it like to be a girl then?

Jessica: Yeah, I just think it's another way of doing research, a certain way of doing research. But it's interesting that science took you to those places. You did it through this scientist. Yeah, it's probably not a very fair question, but do you have a favourite story in your whole collection?

Laura: Someone asked me that last week. I did say 'Frost' last week I think it's perfectly fair, but it changes. I do like 'Frost' because—and I've said the reason I like it is that it was really hard to write—because Dorothy Hodgkin was so interesting. She's such a fascinating woman. She's the only British woman to have won, a very collegial scientist. Totally determined, she spent thirty five years mapping, with her team, the structure of insulin. But she also had all these, like she taught Margaret Thatcher, which as soon as I heard that, that was a really interesting part. So I just tried that story. Not even drafts of 'Frost', totally different plot lines. So I like that story. For that reason. I spent a bit of time in England, so I'm fond of it. But I also like, for all sorts of other reasons, sometimes a story I wrote in a day and suddenly I love it because I was able to write it in a day. And then others, like 'Something Close to Gold' took months and the one at the very end, 'A Brief History of Petroleum' I really like because there are elements of my... well there's elements of my life in all of it... sometimes the stories that are really hard to write become my favourite and others. If I write it in a day, I just want to marry it. I love it.

Jessica: Yeah, that last story I thought was a perfect way to end. It was very well structured and it ended like a full stop with this motif.  

Laura: Thank you! And when I knew that the book would be, I did know early on that it would be the first story would be the 1903 story, at whatever point the 1903 was set. Because it said at different times ...and by the time Frances Arnold won, I did know that that would be the final story in the book and I knew so, whereas with 'Trick of the Light', I'd written these stories—and then you sort out you shuffle the contents for days with your editor, which is fun too—I did know that ultimately the book had to run the story one to story 20, and that's kind of fun as well to map that out in that way. And it has to end... the 20th story does have to mirror in some way, I think, the first story. There are environmental concerns in the first story and in the final story, the protest and sort of dissent are in both of those stories. So they needed to feel a bit bookend. So hopefully they do.

Jessica: Yeah, I thought it was a lovely ending, a lovely connection. And just one last question: what do you hope that readers will take away from your collection of stories?  

Laura: Well, that's a very good question. Perhaps... I find so many elements of these women's lives fascinating and, like I said, if I sat down and wrote these 20 stories again, they would be 20 entirely different stories... Or I'd love someone else to go and do it. Someone else go and do exactly the project that I've done! I want to see what it looks like. So I think... I hope that people become curious about maybe not just these women, because it's a very, you know, certain type of woman, really, who will win a Nobel Prize in the sciences. But like I said, I had never heard of Elizabeth Blackburn. She is alive. She was born in Tasmania. She was on George W. Bush's ethics board while he was president and lost that role in very controversial... I didn't know any of this. And I'm not saying it's the most important thing to know about this woman, but I certainly find it very interesting. And most people can name Marie Curie, really, which is fine. But the women in this group discovered HIV in the context that it causes AIDS. Gertrude Elion worked on a new procedure for drug-making that has saved millions, millions upon millions of lives in terms of leukaemia, drugs and organ transplants, all these sorts of fascinating things that, you know, perhaps it might be nice for us to kind of know these names a little bit, especially we're in a time when people are talking more and more about medical issues in 2020.

Jessica: Yeah.

Laura: It's nice to maybe just be curious about it and see the work that's been done.  

Jessica: Jessica: Yeah. I thought it was a fantastic collection. For people who are listening, the book is released on the 1st of September. SoI get to a local bookstore and buy it and read about these wonderful women, which Laura has done a beautiful job of translating the science that they did in their lives. So thank you, Laura for jumpstarting our series of interviews. 

Laura: Thank you, Jessica!

Jessica: I hope the book does really well. It deserves to.

Laura: Appreciate it. Thank you!