Review: Still Alice, by Lisa Genova

If anyone you know has alzheimer's disease, is currently suffering from it, or may at some point be afflicted either personally or tangentally, you should read this book.

That would be everyone.

Beautiful, touching and very, very sad, Still Alice is told from the perspective of Alice Howland, a fifty year-old psychology professor at Harvard who is diagnosed with early-onset alzheimers at the height of her career. Soon, rather than travelling the country making symposium speeches and conducting world-renowned research, she is struggling to remember her children's names and getting lost on her way home. Eventually, she has to leave her job, and must learn to define her worth as a person, without her life's work as a guide.

As the novel, and the disease, progress, the reader also is faced with questions, such as what it means to be 'of sound mind'. Alice, while still in possession of most of her faculties, writes herself a letter on her computer with instructions on how to find and take an overdose of sleeping pills when she can no longer remember the answers to five important questions, because she doesn't feel that she wants to live to be a burdensome shadow of herself. Her husband feels that he should continue to pursue his career, because she would have wanted him to when she was mentally clearer. As Alice becomes more confused, both of those things become untrue in her present-tense, so which opinions and feelings should have more weight - her 'sane' past self, or her present 'demented' self? Which should take prescedence, rational thought or emotional need? Where does our humanity lie?

Genova, a neuroscientist herself, takes the more painful route by writing the novel in Alice's own rapidly changing perspective to the end. As a result, the reader feels her confusion, and not only observes but experiences her increasing dementia. It would have been emotionally easier to read the second half of the story from the family's point of view, but this is infinitely more worthwhile. We do, however, see the couple's children's struggle with acceptance and coping, and even more intimiately that of her husband, John, who cannot cope with this ultimate upheaval in his life's plans. On the one hand, it would be easy to write John off as an uncaring, emotionally detached, scientist-first kind of person, but on the other, who among us would be able to deal easily with the destruction of our current lives, hopes and future by a disease that doesn't typically occur until life has been almost fully lived? Alice's heartbreak over the thievery of their marriage, and the loss of the many things the future should have held for her, is one of the most compelling plot lines in the book. My one complaint, that I'm not exactly sure what happened at the ending, is bittersweet; the reason *I* am fuzzy on the events is because Alice herself is.

'Alice' is a quick read, even at 320 pages. The chapters are short, and really, you won't notice them going by. I'm so glad I read this book.

Rating: five out of five stars. Beautiful, important, and, ironically, memorable.