Author: Lisa Genova
ISBN: 978-1-7411-4906-1
RRP: $19.99
Still Alice was originally published by Simon & Schuster in 2009. It has now been re-released with a new cover in conjunction with the major motion picture, starring Julianne Moore, released on January 29th.
I hadn’t heard of this one before but the premise certainly grabbed my attention. Still Alice is the story of early onset Alzheimers sufferer Alice Howland and is told in the third person from her perspective.
Alzheimers is not going to be pleasant for anyone, there is no preferred age or profession, but I found that this story touched me profoundly because of Alice’s age and profession.
Alice Howland is a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard, a world-renowned linguistics expert and fifty years old. This is a brilliant mind, a challenged mind and certainly an exercised mind but Alzheimers didn’t care and took it anyway. It started with small moments of forgetfulness or disorientation, attributed to being overstressed, menopausal and a normal part of the aging process. The diagnosis is not easy to swallow, for Alice or her husband.
Still Alice takes us from the early signs through to the late stages of the disease. From a time when Alice was still lecturing and a respected member of her field, needing only to leave herself lots of extra notes and reminders through to her no longer being able to work and needing more and more care.
At one of her earliest appointments the neurologist tells Alice she is an unreliable source of information about what’s going on and yet it is her that tells her story, and she tells it well. Touching, heartbreaking and sympathetic Alice is a character you can’t help but feel for. She was at the peak of her career with plans ahead of her and they were all well and truly taken away from her, one slowly atrophying neuron at a time.
Language is one of the touchstones of Alice’s career, her public speaking has always been exemplary and extensive travel one of the highlights of her calendar so I found it to be doubly tragic that language was one of the first areas to let her down. An increase in disorientation made solo travel inadvisable and the highly independent Alice is suddenly at the mercy of her husband’s busy schedule.
Still Alice takes us through the stages of grief as well as the disease, we are party to the denial, the anger, the bargaining, the prayers and ultimately the acceptance.
The book is fiction but Genova certainly did her homework and worked hard to raise awareness for Alzheimer’s and give a voice to its sufferers.
Alice fights to retain her sense of self and to let everyone know that she is still here, she is still useful and she still has a voice. Her story illustrates the lack of support for early onset sufferers and the stigma felt by them. Alzheimers isn’t necessarily life threatening so as an early onset sufferer Alice could have 30 or 40 years to live with this disease, how is a woman of her independence and reputation going to cope as she slowly loses herself, and can see herself getting lost. She puts in place her own contingency plans with the hope that she can follow them through before it’s too late.
Alice’s family are all career driven and for the most part intellectually focused. John is a biologist dedicated to his work at Harvard, son Tom is a surgeon, daughter Anna is a lawyer and so is her husband. Lydia, the baby of the family, chose to pursue an acting career instead of going to college and her relationship with her mother has always been fractious to say the least. Alice wanted her to go to college and study for a backup plan but Lydia refused. In all the changes faced due to Alice’s disease the most rewarding is the change in her relationship with Lydia.
Still Alice is haunting, it’s poignant and it certainly shines a spotlight on early onset Alzheimer’s. It raises valid questions and issues that we should all keep in mind when dealing with sufferers. I am interested to watch the movie and see how the extremely talented Moore brings Alice to life.
At times Still Alice is a little hard to follow and connect with but I think that’s all part of getting inside of Alice’s head, it is her disconnection that we are feeling. A promising debut which leaves me wondering about what will be next from Genova.
A selection of our lucky readers will be reading Still Alice as part of the Beauty and Lace Book Club so I will be interested to see what they have to say about the book.
Please be advised that there may be spoilers contained in the comments below.
I devour books, vampires and supernatural creatures are my genre of choice but over the past couple of years, I have broadened my horizons considerably. In a nutshell – I love to write! I love interacting with a diverse range of artists to bring you interviews. Perhaps we were perfect before – I LOVE WORDS!
OH WOW – this sounds like a brilliant, if challenging and I’m sure harrowing read. My Mum had Alzheimers but she was over 80 when it took over. To have something as difficult as this at a young age would be incredibly hard to cope with.
Well done to Lisa Genova for being brave enough to produce something like this.
Such a brilliant sounding novel. I need to get my hands on this!
I’m delighted to have been selected to receive and review Still Alice. I can only imagine what it must be like to be faced with something as debilitating as Alzheimers as a young person. From Michelle’s lovely review I am quite confident that the subject will be handled with sympathy and honesty. Looking forward so much to receiving this inspiring sounding book. Thanks so much, Beauty and Lace.
Let me start by saying, once I started this book, I couldn’t stop reading it. I felt so badly and deeply for Alice. I couldn’t ever imagine a life living with Alzeihmers. I was felt so frustrated when things weren’t happening or working out for her and I also thought her husband had to be the most insensitive man that claimed to be a loving husband. I know that helping someone and living with someone with Alzeihmers would be hard but he seemed to just give up on her at the get go. I disliked him immensely. To me, there was no happy ending to this story, it was just too sad to comprehend. As soon as I put this book down upon finishing it, I said to my husband “if I ever get Alzeihmers, and I get bad, I would absolutely rather be dead and I would plan for that to happen”. It was a pretty confronting read in my opinion and It has left me feeling completely blessed for the things I have and sometimes we all take for granted. Thanks for the chance to review this book.
Thank you Beauty & Lace for letting me review ‘Still Alice’. This story makes you really think about how you are living your life in the present, how to make the most of your time on this earth and how you would like to be remembered.
It would be devastating to receive a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s in your early fifties. It would be a terrible thing to lose control over your own mind and thoughts.
As they say ‘it can happen to anyone’.
Cheers
I have just finished reading Still Alice for the second time. Being a big bookworm, I came across this book back when it was first published in 2009, and read it back then, but must admit that the time since, combined with the amount of books I have read between then and now had dulled my memory of it.
I recently went to see Still Alice at the cinemas, prior to reading it as part of this review, so it was great to be able to compare the movie to the book when it’s now so fresh in my mind.
I am familiar with Lisa Genova’s other novels, all of which, like Still Alice, are often confronting but very real, and emotional. If you haven’t read any of her other books, then I highly recommend you do so.
Ok, so Still Alice begins with Alice realising that something slowly but surely is going on with her mental health, and straight from the outset, my heart really felt for her.
Here she was,a woman just turned 50, in the peak of her career, and she is faced with this.
I know that this is a work of fiction, but Alice just seemed so real to me; she could be an older sister, a neighbour, a colleague…
Her struggle as she is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s is sad, and watching her illness gradually take it’s toll on the person she is, is just shattering. She faces things that others in her position would face, and they are things that I take for granted every day, without a second thought. Simple things like tying a shoelace, doing some exercise, using a telephone, or putting on a jumper..
This book opened my eyes and made me realise just how blessed and fortunate I am.
Without giving it all away, I must say that her support from her children was really great to see, but John’s way of dealing with it all was, in my opinion, just not right.
I am so glad that there is a book out there like this to be the voice for those with Alzheimer’s, and to raise awareness about it, and get people talking more about ways in which we can help raise funds so hopefully one day there will be a cure.
I must say that I didn’t like the ending of the book; it just seemed a little unfinished to me. The movie ended the same way and I did hear people commenting on it’s abruptness. It just needed something a little more for me, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it.
The book cover shows actress Julianne Moore, who plays Alice in the movie. She did a beyond remarkable interpretation of her, although in the book, Alice is described as having black curly hair, whereas Julianne has her beautiful straight red hair. Nonetheless, she was perfectly suited for the role in every other way!
I would highly recommend this book, and thank Beauty and Lace for the opportunity to review it.
Thank you for the opportunity to review this book. I flew through it because I couldn’t seem to put it down! I’ve not read any other books written by Lisa Genova, but I will read her other books after having read Still Alice. I enjoyed how the book went through the timeline and allowed me, as the reader, to see how Alzheimer’s not only affected Alice, but also how it impacted on her family and colleagues. I think that it shows how relationships can change with such a diagnosis and how it is frustrating and confusing for the person who receives the diagnosis. Being an academic myself, I kept thinking about myself in that same position and how I would feel at such a loss if my mind was deteriorating. The book goes through an emotional, gripping, and thought provoking story and I’m interested in seeing the movie to see how it compares to the book. I’ve already recommended the book to a number of people so I would certainly recommend reading it if you get the chance!
I wanted to write my comment before reading any other comments and now that I have, I must also note that I did not care for John by the end of the book. I appreciated how some of the other relationships flourished. However, I guess that is showing us, as the readers, how the disease can also affect loved ones and be incredibly sad for them as well to see a person they know and love just disappear over time.
I received my book on Friday before we left town Saturday for a weekend trip. My plan was to read it while away but I found myself a little bit anxious to start so I didn’t begin until this morning on the way home (sunday) I have just finished it! My heart goes out to all that are surrounded by people with this disease as well as those living with it. My choice now is do I give it to someone I know whos mother MAY have this terrible disease as she seems so dead against that this is what she may have.
Still Alice opened up my eyes to so much I had never even considered before and perhaps (hopefully) will change my perception and the way I will react when I come across someone with dementia.
What a beautiful book to write, So much praise for the author, Lisa, and I cannot wait to see the movie, I hope that it lives up to the book.
Thank you for the opportunity to read Still Alice, I think it will change many, many peoples lives for a long time yet.
Regards Katrina
I am honoured to be chosen to review this book.
My best friend’s husband has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at 65, so this book is a way for me to learn how he might feel, so that I can assist them both, especially with emotional support.
The book was well written, easy to read, and difficult to put down once started. The characters are believable, and unlike those reviews above, I feel for the husband John, and the choices he makes. To have your spouse of many years begin to change in so many ways would be confronting and horrible, and each of us may act differently.
Alice’s experiences of memory loss, small things at first, and then terrifying when suddenly she can’t remember how to get home, are described well and make me wonder about my own forgetfulness (I am just a few years older than Alice.)
I did not know the extent of heredity involved in Alzheimer’s, I thought it was a random disease. I can understand Alice’s children’s horror of learning this, and the fear and choices of being tested for it.
The book shows the reader how everyone who knows Alice is affected by her diagnosis: the friends & workmates and their reactions, and her family and the decisions they make, and Alice herself. None of us know how we would cope if it was our loved one (or us!) who received this diagnosis, so the different attitudes in the storyline I find believable, if not agreeable.
I felt the book portrayed the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease and peoples fear, dread, and then reluctant acceptance of it in a very readable way.
Thank you Lisa Genova for a warm, well written story with accurate information. Thank you to Beauty and Lace Book Club for including me in this review.
What can I say? This book left my nerves and emotions frayed and raw. Such a brilliant but heart wrenching book, I found myself sitting and looking at my own children and wondering how awful would it be to look at those faces and not recognise the people that belong to them and the faces of those that I love.
This book had my eyes constantly welling up, reading Alice’s struggles and gradual decline over what really was a short amount of time, and when she no longer recognised her husband was simply heartbreaking. With her moments of lucidity decling at a rapid rate, the feeling that poured off the pages was confronting and frightening.
I had never given a lot of thought to Alzheimer’s but this has really opened my eyes to the horror of such a debilitating disease, especially for those who are diagnosed with early onset symptoms.
There was so much love in the book, especially seeing how such tragic circumstances bought Alice and Lydia closer together, and how even though he was obviously struggling with seeing his wife dissappear in front of him, John tried to be the best husband he knew how to be, even if had to be reminded by his children every now and then.
I would definitely recommend people to read this book, such a good story, but make sure you have tissues handy.
Still Alice is written with alot of realism and compassion. The author Genova writes about a very difficult subject, but does so in a very gentle and caring way. The book certainly gives the reader a sense of what it must be like to live with Alzheimer’s disease.
I would definately recommend this book, it is a beautiful book that tackles a real and sad issue and really touched by heart.