60 pages • 2 hours read
Ali HazelwoodLove on the Brain
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Habenula: Disappointment”
The book begins with Dr. Bee Königswasser, the protagonist, recounting an incident from Dr. Marie Skłodowska-Curie’s life, where she arrived at her wedding in her lab coat. Curie married Pierre Curie after she was rejected for a faculty position at the University of Krakow because she was a woman; this led her to remain in France, where Pierre was, leading them to eventually marry in 1895. Ten years later, Pierre died in an accident, leaving Marie to raise their two daughters alone. Bee uses this story to assert that “trusting people to stick around is a bad idea” (2); she reveals that her own ex-fiancé cheated on her with her best friend six months before their wedding. The one thing that never abandoned Curie was her accomplishments and her curiosity, which is why Bee is thrilled to have been chosen by NASA as a lead scientist on one of their most prestigious neuroengineering projects, BLINK.
Upon receiving this news, Bee celebrates over the weekend with a host of activities, including changing her hair color from pink to purple and downloading a Couch-to-5K training plan. She will be working on designing gear that astronauts will use in space and knows the role could potentially lead to a long-term contract and an eventual independent lab for her own research. However, on Monday evening, Bee receives an email that bursts her happy bubble: The person co-leading the research with her is Levi Ward, Bee’s grad school nemesis.
Levi had been in his fifth year of an engineering PhD when Bee started her first year. When Bee was delivering her first academic talk during her second semester, she had prepared meticulously and dressed especially well for the occasion. Her friend, Annie, pointed this out to Levi, who also was in attendance, asking Levi whether he thought Bee looked pretty that day; he had replied with silence and walked out of the lab, causing the department to believe that Levi despised Bee and found her unattractive. In addition, throughout grad school, Levi actively avoided Bee in personal and professional situations. He told Bee’s ex-fiancé, Tim, that he could do better than Bee and, finally, refused to collaborate with Bee on a project that Dr. Samantha Lee, their shared PhD advisor, enthusiastically brought to them.
Bee calls her twin sister, Reike, who is in Portugal, to vent about having to work with “Dr. Wardass,” a man who clearly despises her and thinks she is a bad scientist. Reike is constantly traveling and is currently tutoring young boys until she has enough money to fly to Norway. Although identical, the sisters having contrasting personalities: With their parents having died when the girls were young, they were constantly shuttled from one relative’s home to the other, across countries and continents. While this gave Bee a need for security and stability, which she had mistakenly believed she found in Tim, it gave Reike a need for constant change.
The sisters discuss Levi and Bee’s upcoming move to Houston. Reike tries to put Bee in touch with someone she knows in the city for Bee to date, but Bee refuses, leading Reike to point out that Bee has “avoidant attachment:” “You’re pathologically independent and don’t let others come close out of fear that they'll eventually leave you” (16). It intensified after Bee’s experience with Tim and is the reason Bee won’t even adopt a cat. After they hang up, Bee begins to pack; she finds the blue Target dress she wore the day Levi supposedly declared her ugly, and stuffs it into the suitcase as well.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Vagus Nerve: Blackout”
Bee travels to Houston with Rocío Cortoreal, her 22-year-old research assistant who, in addition to being very smart, has an affinity for the Gothic and “creepy deadpan sarcasm” (18). Bee apologizes for taking Rocío away from her boyfriend, Alex, for the next three months, but Rocío is thrilled to be moving to Texas and hopes to catch a sighting of La Llorona, a famous “feminist ghost.”
On the flight, Bee secretly checks Twitter. She runs an account called @WhatWouldMarieDo, an extremely popular and controversial account on Academic Twitter; however, no one knows that Bee is the person behind it, including Reike. Following an unpleasant misogynistic experience during grad school, Bee began the account and tweeted about her experience. She received commiseration, support, and even stories from others who had experienced similar incidents. Over time, the account developed a million-strong following and became a place for women in STEM to exchange stories, give and receive advice, and vent. @WhatWouldMarieDo often receives support from another popular anonymous account on Academic Twitter, @Schmacademics. Bee and Schmac even direct message each other often, and despite not knowing each other’s real names, they know quite a bit about each other’s childhoods and lives.
At present, they are discussing Bee’s new project, that Schmac’s cat left a tomato in his shoe, Schmac’s unpleasant politics at work, and how a girl from his past with whom he was in love recently married someone else. Schmac mentions he has to leave as he is working on restructuring his lab, and Bee switches over to check her email: She is annoyed to see that Levi has still not responded to her request to meet and discuss BLINK. Eventually, she falls asleep and dreams of Levi digging a tomato out of a boot with a piece of lab equipment and finally being nice to Bee.
Bee and Rocío get accommodations a short commute from the Sullivan Discovery Building, where they will be working. After unpacking, Bee heads to the Discovery Building to explore her new workspace. She is initially denied entry because she does not have an ID badge yet, but Guy Kowalsky, an astronaut and Bee’s initial point-of-contact at BLINK, recognizes her and lets her in. Guy shows Bee around, telling her that he has been with NASA for almost a decade and worked on BLINK’s precursor as well, and Bee wonders why Levi is leading the project when Guy has been working on it for so long. Guy offers to buy Bee egg sandwiches from the cafeteria, but Bee politely declines, stating that she is vegan.
Just before they head to the neuroscience labs, Guys gets a phone call. While he is on the phone, Bee discovers a calico kitten down the hallway. The kitten jumps onto a cart and dislodges the precariously placed equipment piled onto it. Frozen in place, Bee anticipates it falling on her and crushing her, but someone appears out of nowhere and shoves her aside into a wall, just in time. A disoriented Bee recognizes Levi’s green eyes; he cups her face gently, as if trying to assess her for damage, but Bee doesn’t hear what he is saying, and she blacks out.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Angular Gyrus: Pay Attention”
Bee wakes up early on Monday, excited to go into work while trying her best not to think about what happened on Friday. Her fainting is unremarkable: She faints all the time, including when she hasn’t eaten in a while, or when she looks at pictures of large, hairy spiders. However, she believes she hallucinated Levi carrying her and gently laying her down on a couch before lambasting the engineer who left the cart unattended. Bee can’t imagine Levi siding with her against someone else in any circumstance. Bee dresses for the day in skinny jeans and a red top, fixes her hair in Dutch milkmaid braids, and puts on red lipstick, her favorite septum ring, and her grandmother’s wedding ring, which is her good luck charm.
Guy takes Bee and Rocío on a formal tour, and Bee realizes with increasing dread that none of the labs and the equipment she had requested for is ready yet. Guy promises to make a note of this to Levi and offers to show the women the helmet prototype that the engineers are working on. The helmet is the core of BLINK’s mission, engineered for astronauts based on research about magnetic stimulation of the brain with the aim of reducing the “‘attentional blinks' of astronauts […] little lapses in awareness that are unavoidable when many things happen at once” (40).
Bee admires the design of the helmet but quickly realizes that the placement of the holes for the neurostimulation output is wrong. The current pattern will end up stimulating the angular gyrus, the upper part of which is responsible for increased awareness; however, the lower part is responsible for hallucinations, and for this to not be triggered, the holes need to be farther apart. When the engineers point out that this is Levi’s design, Bee makes a derisive comment about his knowledge of the brain, only to realize that Levi has entered the room and overheard her.
An embarrassed Bee accompanies Guy and the other engineers to a meeting. Someone places two large boxes of donuts in the center of the room, and over the chaos, Guy yells to Bee that the one with blue frosting is vegan. The convening group is entirely white and male, except for one other woman, a young blonde. Once the group around the donut boxes disperses and the meeting is about to begin, a furious Bee realizes that Levi has taken the only vegan donut.
Dr. Boris Covington, who is in charge of overseeing the projects at the Discovery Institute, opens the meeting with an icebreaker, asking people to share their favorite movies. To Bee’s surprise and mild displeasure, she discovers that she and Levi share a favorite movie: The Empire Strikes Back. At the end of the meeting, the blonde woman, who introduces herself as Kaylee Jackson, the project manager for BLINK, approaches Bee and Rocío for the latter’s signature on a document. An inexplicably dumbstruck Rocío is strangely dismissive of Kaylee’s friendly attempts at small talk.
Bee catches up with Levi and thanks him for saving her the other day though he is incredulous of her explanation about the cat. She is surprised to find that Levi remembers her from grad school when he recollects that she was supposed to be working at Vanderbilt, not NIH. He does not know that Bee abandoned this plan after everything that happened over the past couple years. Levi asks about Tim, which Bee finds rude; she assumes that Levi knows about their split since Levi and Tim are frequent collaborators. Bee asks when her requested lab equipment will arrive, but Levi demurs and requests that she email him when she requests a time to meet and discuss BLINK. Before he leaves, Levi informs Bee that there is a dress code she ought to adhere to: “‘Piercings, certain hair colors, certain . . . types of makeup are unacceptable’” (50), leaving Bee incensed.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Parahippocampal Gyrus: Suspicion”
Bee and Rocío’s ID badges are denied access into the building, however, Rocío rejects Bee’s suggestion that they call Kaylee for help, stating that she hates Kaylee. Guy serendipitously arrives and lets them in. With Levi still not answering her emails, Bee asks Guy about the status of their equipment, and he reveals that there is an ongoing authorization issue involving Boris, his supervisors, and Levi. Guy reassures Bee that Levi will fix the problem though she is not convinced; he also states that Levi is a good boss and friend, having helped Guy out after the latter’s divorce, and even doing babysitting playdates with him. Bee is astounded that Levi has a child.
On Bee’s fourth day, after seven unanswered emails, she corners Levi to ask about the equipment, and he once again gives her an evasive answer. When she asks for access to the server, he claims she already has it; then he leaves to attend a phone call. Even Rocío notices and comments on Levi’s apparent dislike for Bee. Bee begins to wonder whether the hold-up in the project is owing to this dislike, and Rocío suggests that Bee ask @WhatWouldMarieDo, revealing that she vents to the account fairly often. Instead, that night Bee calls to vent to Reike, and Reike convinces Bee that Levi wouldn’t sabotage his own project. Bee ends the call convinced that she needs to be firmer in her demands and resolves to confront Levi again if there is no update by the following Monday.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Amygdala: Anger”
Trevor Slate, Bee’s boss at NIH, the organization collaborating with NASA on BLINK, calls her on Monday morning and is horrified to find that she has not even started work yet. Trevor unfairly holds Bee accountable for the hold-up, threatening to replace her if she does not deliver some results soon. The current government is extremely invested in BLINK as it is a project that can be portrayed in favorable light to the public, meaning that the project, and Bee’s work, are under high scrutiny.
Bee calls the company that produces the system she uses to discover that on Bee’s very first day at NASA, Levi cancelled the shipment order. As she is deciding what to do, Kaylee approaches her to ask why Bee wasn’t at a meeting with the astronauts earlier that morning, only to discover that Bee had never received intimation about it. A frustrated Bee storms into Levi’s office to confront him about everything going on, including the missed emails, but Levi responds that he has replied to every single one. Levi further asserts that the situation is a complicated one, and he promises to sort it out in a few days, leading to an outburst from Bee that her job is in danger and questioning whether Levi even cares about BLINK. Even as she berates him, Bee notices photographs in Levi’s office: one with him and another dark-haired man rock climbing and another with a beautiful woman holding a curly-haired toddler.
Levi asks Bee to trust him, but she threatens to go to his superior despite Levi warning her that that would be a bad idea. On her way to Boris’s office, Bee runs into a dejected Rocío, who has just taken the GRE and received an incredibly low score. Bee hugs Rocío and promises to tutor her, but by the time she reaches Boris’s office, she realizes that Levi has beaten her there.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
The main conflicts and plot center on Bee’s belief in Levi’s dislike for her. However, Bee does not recount a single instance where Levi has actually said this, leaving the readers to gather there is more to Levi and Bee’s dynamic than she assumes. This foreshadows an “enemies-to-lovers” trope through which the true nature of their past will reveal itself.
The first chapters establish one of the major themes of the book: The Discrimination Experienced by Women in Stem. The idea is introduced at the very beginning, when Bee opens the narrative with an anecdote from Marie Curie’s life and is added to by details, such as how the team at BLINK is almost entirely male and white. The detail of Curie wearing her lab coat to her wedding will gain importance in Bee’s own life and symbolizes Bee’s own relationship journey. Bee imagines the sense of abandonment Curie feels when Pierre dies, equating it to the kind of loss she has experienced in her own life. It is clear that Bee idolizes Curie and looks to emulate her, and the anecdotes from Curie’s life are a recurring motif throughout the story as a way for Bee to frame her own experiences as a woman in STEM.
Relationships are an important theme, and the opening anecdote additionally points to the kind of life experiences Bee had growing up, which shape how she approaches relationships in her adult life. This introduces a second major theme of The Impact of Family and Childhood Experiences on Adult Relationships. Bee’s conversation with her sister, Reike, further highlights this when Reike points out that Bee has “avoidant attachment.” A deep craving for security and stability in Bee’s life leads to an avoidance of relationships altogether as having been abandoned in the past—by her parents as a child and her ex-fiancé as an adult. She is terrified of the pain that comes with what is, to her, the inevitable end of every relationship. Instead, Bee looks to other, more controllable things from which to derive security: her intellectual and scientific achievements, which, like Curie’s, cannot be taken away.
It is important to note that Reike has been impacted differently by their shared childhood. Whereas Bee confesses to a desire for stability, she describes Reike as having been hard-wired to see change as normal. Reike is constantly traveling and has no desire to put down roots. Thus, although identical in appearance, Reike and Bee are very different in character, pointing to a third theme explored in the book: The Gap between Perceptions and Reality. This can even be seen in Reike and Bee’s appearances: While Reike lives a bohemian and unconventional life, it is Bee who sports piercings and colored hair. This theme is woven into a number of aspects of the book, the largest one being Levi and Bee’s relationship. To Bee, it appears that Levi feels a certain way about her, and she refuses to relinquish this view when it is hinted that the reality may be different. This misperception spills over into Bee and Levi’s working relationship, in which she believes him to be sabotaging their project.
These misunderstandings help contribute to a third trope commonly used in romance novels: the “soul mates” trope, which sees two people who are clearly meant for each other constantly kept apart by some kind of conflict or miscommunication. The “soul mates” trope is highlighted by the relationship between @WhatWouldMarieDo and @Schmacademic, which are Bee and Levi’s Twitter alter-egos. It is not made explicit that Schmac and Levi are the same person, but it is heavily hinted at by the parallels between Schmac and Levi’s lives. Although Bee misses these cues, the revelation is foreshadowed by Bee’s dream, in which Levi and Schmac converge. Bee and Schmac have a clear connection and a number of similarities, which accentuate how well they fit together; however, their ignorance of each other’s true identities, coupled with the misperceptions in their real-life dynamic, contrive to keep them apart, in keeping with the “soul mates” trope.
Other characters introduced in the initial chapters include Bee’s ex-fiancé, Tim, and her ex-best friend, Annie; Guy Kowalsky, a colleague and astronaut at BLINK who comes off as extremely nice and friendly; Dr. Boris Covington and Trevor Slate, Bee’s bosses at NASA and NIH respectively; Rocío Cortoreal, Bee’s young research assistant; and Kaylee Jackson, the project manager at BLINK. In a mirroring of Bee and Levi’s equation, Rocío, too, seems to have an instantaneous reaction to Kaylee that eventually turns out to be very different than Rocío originally admits. Hazelwood introduces a number of symbols, such as Bee’s blue Target dress and cats. Schmac mentions his cat, and Bee finds a calico kitten in the Discovery Institute building; both of these creatures play small, but important parts in the story, going forward.
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By Ali Hazelwood
