Compassionate Science

As scientists discover how more and more of our behavior is the result of our genes or our brain chemistry, the question of how these influences create what we call a person’s “character” is not easily answered.

This intersection between science and behavior is where novelist Lisa Genova points her laser, and opens her heart.

Genova, who has a degree in biopsychology from Bates and a PhD from Harvard in neuroscience, has made a career of creating characters with neurological disorders, characters her readers both identify with and learn from.

Her first novel, Still Alice, the self-published phenomenon that made the New York Times Bestseller list and was eventually picked up by Simon & Schuster, featured a college professor who develops early onset Alzheimer’s.

Told from the point of view of the woman who loses her ability to function over the course of the book, Genova was praised for her ability to translate medical symptoms into a compassionate and immensely relatable story.

An accomplished and engaging speaker, Genova began her talk last Monday at the by explaining the neurological condition left neglect, which is the subject of her latest book, Left Neglected.

Brought on by a stroke or trauma to the right side of the brain, a person with this condition would eat only the food on the right side of the plate, not able to perceive anything on the left. A man “would shave half of his face,” and a woman “would put on half her make-up.”

The “beginning curiosity that led to this book” came to Genova while reading Oliver Sack’s classic, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In it, a man wakes up every night in the hospital with a cold limb in his bed. He thinks the nurse has played a trick on him and kicks the foreign object out only to fall out of bed—the cold, unfamiliar object is his own left leg, which he can’t perceive because he suffers from left neglect.

Genova asked, “What happens to this man when he goes home? How does this person function?”

In Left Neglected, she tries to answer those questions. Sarah, a 37-year-old mother and VP of Human Resources, has a car accident while making a quick work call on her cell phone. Left unable to care for herself, she must depend on her husband, and her long estranged mother for almost everything.

Genova said the condition of left neglect acts “as a metaphor for what we pay attention to and what we don’t.” The story is “about all the ways we don’t pay attention to things in our lives and call that normal. If our attention is spread that thinly, what are (we) ignoring?” She went on to add that our current state of distraction is “almost an epidemic” and “cell phones are an example.”

Genova had a warm and receptive audience, many of whom brought copies of Still Alice for her to sign. They also bought copies of her new book.

One audience member complimented Genova for her “perfect mix of humor and knowledge,” adding that her writing, although about complex neurological disorders was “simple to read and understand.”

Genova’s next novel, Love Anthony, slated for publication in January 2013, will be about an extremely autistic boy and his mother, and is told from these two main characters’ points of view. She explained the concept — if touching, eye contact or speech is “not available then how do we love?”

As she has for all her books, extensive research precedes any leap into fiction. It’s a formula that’s worked very well so far for both Genova and her dedicated readers.