Still Alice by Lisa GenovaMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The subject matter of Still Alice hit a personal note for me: a family friend a couple years younger than my mother (so barely 60) has dementia. A few years ago she was bubbly and gregarious and would attend holiday dinners with her adopted son; today she lives in an assisted living facility with people two or three decades older than her. My "Aunt" J. is the first person close to me with dementia; before her I never knew firsthand the way Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia ravage a person's mind and spirit.
And so Still Alice was a powerful book for me, made even more so because it tells the story of a woman with early-onset Alzheimer's disease from her own perspective. When the novel begins, 50-year-old Alice is a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard with a husband and 3 grown children. She begins experience jarring lapses of memory like forgetting words, missing appointments and even a flight, and most disturbingly becoming lost 10 minutes from her home. While at first she chalks these changes up to menopause and/or stress, a doctor confirms that she is actually suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
As someone whose career and identity revolve around her intellect, Alice is especially devastated when the mind that long-defined her begins to disintegrate, but as she comes to terms with her illness she is able to realize that what makes her "her" is so much bigger than her mind.
The novel depicts the progression of Alice's disease over the course of two years; each chapter encompasses a month of her life. Thus, the reader witnesses the gradual breakdown of her mental facilities from minor memory lapses and occasions of disorientation to her inability to work, travel alone, or, often, to even recognize family members. The simplicity of the writing is a strength as the reader is able to grasp what it is like to be someone with diminishing memory and awareness. And while we witness Alice's fear and confusion, we also experience her courage and the love she still has for her family and her life. We see her re-evaluate, in a sense, what makes her life worth living.
It is obvious that Lisa Genova, who has written other fictional accounts of degenerative illnesses, has done sufficient research on Alzheimer's, but the book never comes across as clinical. It helps the reader understand what it is to live with dementia in the way that mere facts and statistics cannot.
Still Alice also conveys the conflicted emotions of Alice's husband and children as they learn of her diagnosis and then watch her illness progress. Initially, some of the characters come across as one-dimensional (especially Alice's two daughters), but as we see them cope with their mother's illness in realistic ways, they gain depth. And Alice's husband reacts in ways that are frustrating to witness but understandable and human (initially with denial, then making choices that seem to put his career ahead of his time with Alice).
It is an anguishing subject matter, but Still Alice manages to be, overall, a story of hope. It ends with one of its most moving scenes: Alice's actress daughter, Lydia, performs a skit for her. And while Alice is unable to understand the words of the script, Lydia's tone, facial expressions, and body language communicate emotion to her mother. That emotion?
Love.
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