Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren

This book was incredible. It's a memoir of a biologist, interspersed with small sections of thematically relevant plant facts. But as well as it being the story of her scientific life, it's also just as much the story of her relationship with Bill, her best friend/chosen brother/platonic soulmate/lab manager/whatever you want to call him, and how central the two of them are to each other, how important.

So at its heart this book is just a lovely look at two weirdos who love science and each other, and that is just like EVERYTHING GOOD?? I had a lot of feelings. Plus the quality of the prose in this book is great which is always nice too, and not to be relied upon in memoirs!

(it's super weird though to read professional reviews of this book. One review I read mentioned Bill in all of one paragraph out of about fifteen, clearly seeing his and Hope's friendship as a minor facet of the book. Hope's pretty clear in the last chapter of the book that in large part writing this book was writing about Bill, and the important connection between Bill and Hope permeates the entirety of the book! But because the rest of the world doesn't know how to understand important platonic relationships, this gets sidelined in reviews. Ugh.)