Life Without Fiction is a collection of stories with a broad range of topics. For example: Crazy Woman tracks Essie from happy newlywed to a woman driven to taking drastic but hilarious action against her womanizing husband, Bud. The Sixth Extinction is a science fiction story that takes place in a future world overrun by fungi, where humans are infected with it and die by thirty-five years of age. Life Without Fiction is about a bet a woman makes with her mother that she can't live without fiction for one month. She substitutes sex for fiction with a startling result. Soul Mate takes place in the Chicago Art Museum where two, second grade best friends get together after decades; will he be the soul mate she thinks he is? Touch is about a woman mourning the loss of her lover, who has killed her daughter. In Custodian of the Dead, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide relates her personal tragedy and how she memorializes the dead. In B.Y.O.B. (Bring Your Own Boots), Arnold takes part in a worldwide Naturalist walk wearing only his boots and gets arrested, forever changing his life. A grandmother tells her two grandchildren that the tealeaves say she will die that night, and her ten-year old granddaughter has to figure out how to help her in Tealeaf Fortune. In The Reassembled Life, Paula discovers what happens when you mess with the vectors of similarity.