Still Alice

"Still Alice" is a touching, moving, and heartbreaking novel of a woman's decline after being diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's at the age of fifty.

Alice Howland is a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a world-renowned expert in linguistics. In Alice's personal life, she is married to a successful biologist and is the mother of three grown children. The novel begins with a unnamed prologue regarding the death of neurons in her brains and acts as a way to set the stage for the rest of the novel.

Although Alice initially thinks that her forgotten words due to stress, depression, or menopause, she is eventually diagnosed as having early-onset Alzheimer's. After her diagnosis, she is reluctant to share the diagnosis with her husband due to the worry of how she will be perceived by her family and her co-workers.

As the novel progresses, the reader sees Alice's mental decline from an intelligent professor and book author to eventually being unable to remember the days of the week, the names of her husband and the names of her children. Although Alice's life changes drastically, her Alzheimer's diagnosis provides a way to become closer to her children.

"Still Alice" provides a truthful and respectful depiction of one woman's experience with Alzheimer's. I enjoyed this novel in that it gives insight on how a person with Alzheimer experiences life in a way that is honest and powerful. The author creates a thoughtful and informative novel that presents the entire range of emotions Alice experiences as she loses the identity she has connected to her intelligence. Overall, this is a wonderful book that provides unique insight on the experience of early-onset Alzheimer's and can possibly inspire the reader to learn more about Alzheimer's and especially early-onset Alzheimer's.

Still Alice is not what I expected. It is the story of a woman diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease, made ironic by the fact that she is a professor of linguistics at Harvard. Language is her life: it is how she sees and understands the world. The prospect of losing that language is terrifying for her. Her husband is another Harvard professor, in biology; her older daughter is a successful lawyer, her son a Harvard medical student, and her black sheep daughter Lydia eschewed college to become an actress.

Alice's descent into the morass of Alzheimer's (Genova describes it as a thick, weedy swamp that Alice can't fight through) is sad. But it's sort of sad....clinically. There is little lyricism in this book, and while I don't think every author should have a touch of poetry in their work, I think this topic could be treated less starkly. That isn't a comment on Genova as a person who doesn't respect her subject; I mean she doesn't make an emotional connection that another author might make. It is still a great book, a very fast read that pulls you along. Genova uses the second person tense from Alice's perspective, which I think is an interesting choice since most of the action is happening inside Alice's head. I think this choice is my favorite part of the book, though, watching the narrator become less and less able to describe what is happening. It mirrors what Alice is going through instead of putting us in her point of view, because of course, we cannot see Alice's point of view. We can never really know what she is experiencing, although Genova does a great job of describing her decline.

I'm interested to see the movie. I think the trailers influenced my thoughts on the book quite a bit.

Fascinating look into Alzheimer's Disease from a personal, humanizing, and empathetic standpoint.