Lacking in Substance

by Laura Otis

Middle-aged misfit Carrie McFadden won't let people tell her how to love. At 43, she sets out on a cross-country trip to confront her old love, Johnny Turner, from her days as a scientist. On the road, Carrie begins a novel that she has been trying to write for years. But in making the trip, she is neglecting her sick mother, and as writes, life closes in on her. In her novel, the Mexican immigrant Teresa must fend off her employer's advances and her boyfriend's violence. Carrie herself faces a lonely man's overtures, a caregiver's demands that she visit her mother, and a doctor's belief that a woman travelling alone should be medicated for mental illness. As Carrie approaches Johnny in San Francisco, her life and her novel converge. Like Teresa, she must choose the direction her life will take if she wants to survive.

368 pages, Paperback

Published December 10, 2019

About the author

Trained as a neuroscientist and literary scholar, Laura Otis, Ph.D., studies the ways that literature and science intersect. In her interdisciplinary research, she compares scientific and literary writers' descriptions of memory, identity, emotion, and thought. Her research has been supported by MacArthur, Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Humboldt Fellowships. Otis earned her BS in Biochemistry at Yale University, her MA in Neuroscience from the University of California at San Francisco, her PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, and her MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College. Since 2004 she has been a Professor of English at Emory University, where she teaches interdisciplinary courses on literature, neuroscience, cognitive science, and medicine. Otis is the author of Organic Memory (1994), Membranes (1999), Networking (2001), Müller’s Lab (2007), Rethinking Thought (2016), and Banned Emotions (2019). She has also translated neurobiologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Vacation Stories (2001) into English and has edited Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (2002). A fiction-writer as well as a scholar, she is the author of the novels Clean, Refiner’s Fire, Lacking in Substance, The Tantalus Letters, and The Memory Hive. Her current project, The Neuroscience of Craft, examines what neuroscientists and creative writers can learn from each other about how sensations blend in people’s minds.