Still Alice

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease. Fiercely independent, Alice struggles to maintain her lifestyle and live in the moment, even as her sense of self is being stripped away. In turns heartbreaking, inspiring and terrifying, Still Alice captures in remarkable detail what's it's like to literally lose your mind...


I really didn't have any interest in this novel until the movie was nominated for a bunch of Academy Awards. It was popular when I was working at the bookstores and my book snobbishness got in the way. I didn't get a chance to read it before the Oscars, but when the film popped up on Netflix, I figured there was no time like the present!

This is a really brilliant novel that gets into your head. The complexities of a neurological disorder like Alzheimer's can make an audience feel disassociated, but Genova does a great job of showing how people with Alzheimer's can be completely lucid at some points and lost in the next. To be honest, at many points while reading what Alice was going through, I questioned whether I have early-onset Alzheimer's myself. And I really think that's Genova's point: it can happen to anyone. It's not one of those things that if you stop using it, you lose it. You can do brain teasers and read every day, but if Alzheimer's is in your genes, you're going to get it regardless. Might be when you're 40, or it could be when you're 90. There is no way to tell.

One of the other elements captured by this novel is how difficult it is on her family. I think the earlier signs of Alzheimer's are more difficult for the person going through it, the frustrations of not having any control. Whereas the later more drastic forms of it are tougher on family, at some point the person with Alzheimer's becomes somewhat complacent with their constant state of confusion, but watching a loved one deteriorate like that can be devastating. I was reminded of this video on YouTube that I think someone posted on facebook a while back of a Daughter with her Mom that has Alzheimers. It's a very sweet video of one of the few lucid moments that mean so much. It's amazing that the daughter caught it on camera. That is a moment to treasure forever and watch over and over.