Writing with humor strikes me as being out of character, after all my children both say I have no sense of humor. I don’t like being teased for a fact. But I do enjoy humor, apart from the humor they mean when they say, “Can’t you take a joke?” It has always seemed to me that if you have to take it, it’s a pill not a joke. Furthermore, I am writing a memoir of frustration, about falling in love with science, specifically with DNA, only to bang my head against innumerable ‘Men Only’ doors in the science world. So what’s funny about that? Not much, I think. In fact, I wonder if I am doing an act of catharsis and might some day burn the memoir on a ceremonial pyre, giving up all that anger.

But, I went to the Willamette Writers’ Conference and paid to have Melissa Hart review a chapter from my memoir. She told me, “You have a lot of humor in your writing. You should feature it more!”

An early boyfriend told me affectionately, “Never ask, ‘what do you mean?’ because it just shows how ‘out of it’ you really are. I like it but others won’t.” That advice served me well. Secretly I am out of tune with the culture and all that it values, and his advice helped me keep that lack of synch to myself. But I just had to know, after all I had paid for Melissa’s advice. So I asked her, “What do you mean? Can you give me an example of something humorous from my writing?”

“Sure,” she said, “You had me rolling on the floor with cutting the heads off flies. And your offhanded sarcasm about New York was funny too.”

Well, turn me to stone. I had no answer to that one. The New York part I could sort of relate to, but the fly executioner wasn’t a role I relished, it was a job I had to take to make a little money in college. What in the world was funny about that? But, being a scientist, I had to investigate.

So, when I came back down the coast to Los Angeles, I asked some of my friends, “What do you think, is it funny to cut the heads off flies?” I was really surprised to find that 87.5 percent of those I asked cracked up. Who knew flies are so funny? Certainly I hadn’t known before. Sadly, flies don’t come into the story anywhere else so their intrinsic humor was a limited aid to me in making my story funny.

At the writers’ conference, I bought a book written by my mentor, entitled Assault of Laughter. It was about how she and her siblings coped when her mother came out as a gay woman while they were growing up, not a topic that I thought would be funny. But reading that book showed me how wrong I was. Imagine scaring your brother by convincing him that he might turn into a mermaid if he bathed. OK, so how about running into brick walls trying to be a woman DNA jockey?

A lot of my experiences made me very angry, but in retrospect some of them were funny too. Imagine opening a letter from Princeton University and reading this: “Dear Miss Livingston: We have not sent you the Graduate Catalog you requested. The policy of Princeton University is that women are not admitted unless they have a peculiar need for our facilities.” Even I have to admit that’s funny. And what about this one. I was listening to a lecture by a Nobel prize winner who had discovered Vitamin C, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He said, “I was sure the vitamin would be fluorescent, so I spent months isolating fluorescent compounds, but none of them was the vitamin. They all turned out to be contaminants from my rubber tubing, because the vitamin was not fluorescent at all.” That was funny to me even at the time. So, I guess I will take Melissa’s advice and enhance the humor in my memoir, and I suspect I will have a lot of fun doing it.

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