Tag: Andrea Barrett

‘The Behavior of the Hawkweeds’ by Andrea Barrett

There are some titles that draw me in immediately and I’m a sucker for this one – it’s so specific, so… vegetal. Andrea Barrett is rather an unusual writer who often writes about the history of science, particularly the nineteenth-century world of natural history. This story is one of my favourites by her, intertwining the story of Gregor Mendel’s experiments with peas, a terrible accident in which a young girl’s grandfather kills a man, and the same girl’s later life as the wife of a rather insufferable genetics lecturer. Scientific ideas are more than just the background to Barrett’s stories; she is deeply knowledgeable about the culture of scientific experiment and the way that human concerns shape what is studied and how, and that the person gets the credit isn’t always the person who deserves it.

First published in The Missouri Review, 1994. Collected in Ship Fever, WW Norton & Co, 1996. Available to read online via Project Muse here

‘The Mysteries of Ubiquitin’ by Andrea Barrett

Rose is eight years old when she first meets, Peter, an entomologist in his late 20s. Her parents laugh at her passionate crush on their dashing and charismatic contemporary, but Rose is furious that she’s not taken seriously. More than two decades later, Rose runs into Peter in an airport. She is a celebrated biochemist, he is less accomplished, and the connection they feel to one another is intense and reverberates – it is rooted in their shared history as well as a contemporary attraction. It is easy for them to begin a relationship, but Rose begins to see what their age different means as time goes on. “When she returned to Boston Peter had bronchitis and emerged from the shower hacking and coughing, each cough making the loose flesh around his nipples shimmy,” we’re told. Their parting – just like their coming together – is complex, bound up with other memories and other griefs that (like ubiquitin) are ubiquitous.

From Servants of the Map (W. W. Norton & Company). You can find Andrea Barret’s website here