Love on the Brain

“[T]he real villain, the one that had Marie crying and staring at the ceiling in the late hours of the night, is loss. Grief. The intrinsic transience of human relationships. The real villain is love: an unstable isotope, constantly undergoing spontaneous nuclear decay.”

Bee describes Curie’s experience of becoming a widow and equates it to the loss she has experienced in her own life. This passage displays two things: that Bee idolizes Curie and that Bee experiences a deep fear of being hurt or abandoned that causes her to avoid real emotional investment in relationships.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a community of women trying to mind their own business must be in want of a random man’s opinion.”

Bee reflects on how random men on the internet insist on asserting their opinion on her Twitter page, @WhatWouldMarieDo, in the midst of women trying to commiserate about their personal experiences in STEM. The passage calls to the theme of Discrimination Experienced by Women in STEM, highlighting how women frequently experience condescension and judgment from men about everything from their work to their personal lives.

“‘Grad school’s stressful for everyone,’ Tim would say when I complained about my entirely male advisory committee. ‘You keep going on about Marie Curie—she was the only woman in all of science at the time, and she got two Nobel Prizes.’

Of course, Curie was not the only female scientist at the time. Dr. Lise Meitner, Dr. Emmy Noether, Alice Ball, Dr. Nettie Stevens, Henrietta Leavitt, and countless others were active, doing better science with the tip of their little fingers than Tim will ever manage […].”

Bee describes how Tim, her ex-fiancé, dismisses Bee’s dissatisfaction with having to deal with a male-dominated environment in grad school. Besides highlighting the under-representation of women and other marginalized groups in academia, this passage also displays the insensitivity and callousness that characterize Tim in his relationship with Bee. It also points to the general lack of information surrounding women in STEM as Tim mistakenly believes Curie was the only female scientist active during her time.