Still Alice by Lisa Genova

Lisa Genova first paid a company to publish and distribute this book to independent bookstores, until she was finally introduced to the right agent and negotiated the book’s official release. Ms.Genova has a PhD in Neuroscience from Harvard, writes for the National Alzheimer’s Association, and is an actress. Her grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and this was the inspiration for Still Alice, her first novel. The book’s heroine is a Harvard professor, Alice, who discovers that she has, at age 49, an early onset of Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicts 10% of all those diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. One of Alice’s first warnings of the disease is forgetting some words of a speech, and this episode is swiftly followed by one in which she can’t (momentarily) find her way home. She sees her surroundings, she knows what buildings are which, but nothing tells her which way to turn. This riveting illustration of how everything can be known but without the connections needed to function kept me reading, committed to the journey’s end. Genova has the credentials to write accurately about the stages and symptoms of Alzheimer's, and about the current medication and life strategies for the patient and family. What most of us lack , however, is not just this specific knowledge of Alzheimer’s that Genova offers in her book, but the ability to imagine what the sufferer is experiencing. The poetic license Genova assumes in writing the book from Alice’s point of view is risky, and not all readers concur in how believable the story is. I found it both convincing and enlightening. I recommend the book, at the very least for inviting us to consider and ponder on how we do persist as individuals, even under the most debilitating of circumstances.