Bonnie Garmus reveals 98 rejection letters before success of ‘Lessons in Chemistry’

When I first started writing in the technology space for advertising, it was so interesting, innovative and full of promise. Then it seemed to be slowly sliding into something that I didn’t recognise. It was becoming more about making money instead of making what was worthwhile. I was really at a crossroads with what I was doing, and I was turning down more and more work because I didn’t feel good about what they were doing. This was way back before people talked about AI all the time and what a danger it is, but back then, we all knew about it and knew it was a danger. It was simply that people took it more seriously than they do today, and they would have never allowed it to come out as unregulated as it has.

Peck & Peck follows a devoted young poet, Batter Gray, who gets a job at a prestigious, if dysfunctional, poetry journal – the titular Peck & Peck – in New York in 1983. What part of the story came to you first? It was the Peck & Peck office building. As I walk around cities – I live in England – I think more and more we see the same thing over and over. We see another Kentucky Fried Chicken, another Starbucks, or whatever. There’s this creeping conformity that’s been going on for a long time around the world where we go for the familiar, and I wanted to create a building that was unfamiliar. It’s not like [Barcelona’s] Sagrada Família, but it’s like that in the sense that there’s only one in the world.

At the heart of the novel is a battle between commercial imperative and artistic integrity. Do you think those two things can ever happily coexist? I think they’ve always been at each other’s throats, but the world has become much more devoted to technology in a way that worries me. Now technology has decided that it’s going to take over the arts and do the arts for us as well. I don’t want it to do the arts for us. Technology is not an artist, and it doesn’t have the ability to do it in the same way. So I do worry a lot that this idea that technology can do everything is really misguided.

There’s always been a belief – and my character believes it – that you’re supposed to get a good job as a lawyer, in accounting, or somewhere where you can make a living, and I certainly understand that [laughs]. I have two kids, and if one of them had come home and said, “I’ve decided to become a poet for my living,” I would have said, “Oh, how interesting ... but you have to do something else as well.” So yeah, there’s always this push-pull. But it turns out the arts are every bit as vital as anything else – as medicine, lawyerly work, maths or science. They’re all vital.

There is something incredibly touching about your character Batter Gray’s obsession with poetry. Many of the staff who work at Peck & Peck are also obsessed. Do you think we need more people who care unreasonably deeply about the arts? Is that the antidote to the role of technology now? Yeah, I think so. It occurred to me as I was writing this book that it would be just bizarre if poetry was the one thing that ended up saving us. Poetry – the least-admired, least-read art – stepping forward and saying, “Here’s what we need to do.” The strange thing about poetry is that it’s incredibly honest, and right now we live in a very dishonest age.

Before you published Lessons in Chemistry – which has gone on to become a phenomenal bestseller, with millions of copies sold worldwide and a hit TV series – you worked across all kinds of different writing. Was novel-writing always the calling? Oh, I was always doing it. You know how in Hollywood, every star has a script in their drawer? In copywriting and advertising, every copywriter and creative director has a book in their drawer. It’s not that you don’t want to do it; it’s that it doesn’t pay. You can’t survive. Ninety-nine per cent of all writers don’t make more than minimum wage.