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!
This book really has touched me. We have just recently had to deal with a death, and this book has helped me.
It is amazingly written, emotional, confronting, yet a story that is realistic and you can relate to.
It is heartbreaking there is no cure, heartbreaking that people have to struggle with this.
After finishing this book, i am passing this to my mum, to help her with the death of her mum from this disease.
Still with Alice was a very life like story, very close to my heart.
My Mum died in August 2009 exactly 3 months after her 90th birthday. having suffered from the disease for at least 3 years, probably longer undiagnosed. She was too elderly to understand the changes in her life and those around her.
Alice understood the impact on her life, but was determined to carry on living a full life for as long as she could before being forced to make huge lifestyle changes. It explained the treatment to keep her brain stimulated. It also revealed how her husband and family adjusted to the changed her life and how they assisted her in staying safe. One touchimg moment was when she held her baby granddaughter for the first time. Their daughter who didn’t meet her Mum’s ambitions for her was the one who dedicated herself to caring for her Mum the most and was most supportive, often staying with her and accepting different acting roles she could stay close to her Mum and Dad rather than where more work was readily available. Last Monday I went to see the Movie adapted from the book. Not many books make successful movies. It did the book full credit, very little was changed, if any, and really brought home the full impact on Alice’s life. I will admit I shed a few tears while reading the book which was very compelling reading. I literally read it until I fell asleep each time. I will probably read it again fairly soon. I think I will absorb and understand more of the story with the disease by reading it again.
I have just finished reading Still Alice I seen the movie and the book is just as good as that . I have known people with this disease most of them family it is a terrible thing to happen to our loved one’s . The book really touched me in so many ways seeing the movie was heart breaking but then to read about it also really puts things into perspective for me loved the book thank you for the opportunity so much
Many thanks for giving me this opportunity to read this moving book.
It was very hard for me not to put it down as I felt compelled to read and read.
It make me think about my own vulnerability. What a confronting and heartbreaking story!
Like Alice I love the world of words and thoughts .I thought about her frustration and despair.
It moved me to tears her children’s attitude, especially her younger daughter Lydia. The author Lisa Genova wrote a compelling, touching book, full of compassion.
Again, many thanks Beauty and Lace from the bottom of my heart.
Beatriz
I thought this book was very well written and easy to read. It gives a heart wrenching insight into the world of of this horrid debilitating disease, not only for the sufferer and also for the carers, family etc.
I found the book hard to put down once I started it. The author made the book very easy to read and it was filled with such emotion that I became lost in the book until it was finished. I could relate to so many things in the story as I too have had my life effected by a close relative with this horrid disease. There are so many stages that the sufferer goes through and one feels so helpless watching them suffer.
I look forward to Lisa Genova producing another book of such high quality
I loved this book and at the same time found it scary and disturbing.
Alzheimers runs in my family and I have always had this fear that it was in my future. I watched my Aunt forget her siblings and her children but oddly she was always able to remember my daughter without missing a beat.
I felt that I understood some of things that Alice went through. I suffer from Migraines and once experienced a different type of Migraine where there was no pain but I was unable to think clearly or mores the truth I wasnt able to put my thoughts into actions. I was online and chatting to a friend but then found I didnt know how to say certain words so I had to use other words to say what i wanted to say. I started to panic and decided I must be tired and should go to bed so I got offline and went to brush my teeth before bed. I held the toothpaste in one hand and the toothbrush in the other and I knew I had to put toothpaste on the brush but for the life of me I couldnt work out how to do this. I was so scared that this was the start of Alzheimers. I went to bed and decided to test myself with my phone number, address, etc but then i wondered if my answers to myself were correct or not. I ended up visiting the Doctors and was relieved to find it was a type of migraine but it also scared me. What if Alzheimers was the same and you could think clearly but couldnt put these things into words or actions and so you were trapped inside yourself?
We tend to think of this disease as being something that hits the elderly and not a 50 year old woman. My age and I also have 3 children although im not as well educated as Alice but I do like to think that although i might be slack with physical exercise I am always doing crosswords and such to exercise my brain.
This book is one that is very much worth reading especially if you know someone who is battling the disease. It gives you an insiders view and shows you how very scary it is. To have the knowledge that you are slowly losing yourself.
I tried to get my eldest daughter to read this book she wouldnt. She is like me and carries the fear that it might be her future as well.
Please read this book. It will make you smile, cry and at times feel scared.
I won’t recap the story as that’s been outlined above.
“Still Alice” was an interesting and challenging book to read. By choosing to use Alice’s perspective, Genova gives us a strong and unusual insight into the experience of Alzheimer’s, and how you lose yourself. I found this strongly empathetic, and both sad and moving.
However, there were some challenges with this. Most notably, because Alice herself has trouble with time, so too do we; it was a little tricky to keep any sense of the timeline of her deterioration. Alice is an unreliable narrator in many ways, but generally Genova finds ways around this; it didn’t quite seem to work with the timeline. The result is that her deterioration seems very abrupt.
Perhaps the biggest negative to me about this novel was the things left out of it. Alice and her husband never seem to have a conversation about the future, about what will happen, her wishes, her expectations of him and his care for her. Similarly, Alice’s three children react differently to the idea of being tested for the gene causing her Alzheimers, and announce yes or no – but there is no discussion of why one child chooses “no”. Wouldn’t you at least ask “Why not?” It seemed odd that a professor of linguistics would not discuss such important issues with her family.
The other difficulty was the occasional lack of emotion in the novel – I found sometimes that everyone seemed a little flat, with no emotional life. This made it hard to fully engage with Alice’s plight.
Despite these flaws, I’m glad I read this novel. It’s a well written exploration of a woman facing something terrible, and re-discovering some of the essentials of life. It’s an important issue, and a perspective we don’t often hear. I’m not sure I’d exactly use the word entertaining, but it’s a readable and accessible presentation of the illness and its consequences.
I’d like to thank Beauty and Lace for allowing me to review this inspiring book. Still Alice sounded like a book that I’d be interested in reading. That was confirmed when I opened the book and didn’t put it down until it was finished!
This book delved into a topic that most people shy away from and avoid and allowed for me to understand just a little about what it would be like for someone with this horrible condition.
I really enjoyed reading this novel and am excited for her next one to be released!
still alice is a well written book!
Alot of people dont like to talk or delve into alzeimers, the fact that it can happen to anyone proves it through this book.
Everyon needs to be supported through this horrible disease.