Still Alice

After it took me almost 2 weeks to finish The Blondes piece of trash, I hoped to find something that would be truly entertaining, emotional, and engaging. I knew Julianne Moore won the Oscar for portraying the title character in the film adaptation, so that fact piqued my interest. My grandmother also praised this book as it gave a description of Alzheimer's from the point of view of an intellectual elite. She also recommended that anyone who knows someone diagnosed with Alzheimers/dementia or anyone elderly and afraid of losing their mind should pick this up.

Still Alice by Lisa Genova

Genre: Fiction, Alzheimers
Publication Date: (self-published) 2007 and later published 2009
Setting: Harvard/Cambridge, 2003-2005

Alice Howland is a 50 year-old esteemed psychologist teaching and doing research at Harvard University, married to an equally distinguished man also teaching and researching (biology) at Harvard. Alice is brilliant, busy, and driven, until one day she goes for a run around her neighborhood in Harvard Yard and can't find her way home. She begins noticing lapses in memory, confusion, and disorientation. Eventually, she discovers that she has early-onset Alzheimers. How could this happen to a 50 year-old woman, who runs 5 miles every day, and is a tenured professor at one of the most prestigious universities in the country? Genetics.

The book is told in the third-person, telling us Alice's thoughts and feelings about the disorder, while I the reader am able to see her lose more of her memory (while Alice has no notice).  Initially, she recognizes that she can't remember the words for every day objects and she gets frustrated. But, like the disease, it gets worse. Eventually, she doesn't even realize she can't remember the words. She'll forget what she's forgetting. She'll create questions for herself to answer, and not realize that the answers that she is giving are incorrect. Which is what makes this disease so terrifying, it isn't destroying your body like cancer, it is destroying your mind, which is what makes you you. "I think therefore I am..." but what happens when your cognitive abilities and mental capacities decline and deteriorate? Are you still you? Is she still Alice? Is she still a brilliant Harvard professor even when she has to cease teaching? Is she still a loving mother after she forgets who her children are, or that she has children? Who are you are when you don't have control of your mind.

Finished reading: Sunday, July 19, 2015
Yes, I read it immediately after The Blondes, did not put it down, and finished in under 12 hours.

DD's rating: A
Terrific read. Truly frightening and enlightening to read about how someone as intelligent as Alice can still succumb to a degenerative mental disease. Also gives insight about how loved ones and caregivers may come across to those who have dementia - they are a person before they are a patient.

Next read: The Big Short by Michael Lewis, or possibly something less ambitious and less about my worst subject (economics), like The Dog Stars by Peter Heller