The Memory Hive

by Laura Otis

While still reeling from the after-effects of a painful relationship with a married man, English professor Cara Heming risks everything and marries Diego, a Spaniard she has just met. As she helps her new husband adjust to life in New York, Cara struggles to balance her demanding job and the needs of her demented mother and depressed father. Frustrated by Cara’s focus on her parents and her work, Diego transforms into an angry, jealous, and paranoid partner. Far from perfect herself, puritanically inclined Cara harbors biases that help inflame Diego’s rage. When he and Cara’s mother grow increasingly vicious, Cara must join forces with her timid father, who soon surprises her. Trying to find her way out of the darkness, Cara must fight to survive the consequences of her mistakes. The Memory Hive is the compelling tale of a woman’s journey of tragic errors, terrifying abuse, and growing resilience after she marries a Spaniard she barely knows.

202 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

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.