Still Alice by Lisa Genova

Alice Howland—Harvard professor, gifted researcher, and lecturer, wife, and mother of three grown children—sets out for a run and soon realizes she has no idea how to find her way home. She has taken the route for years, but nothing looks familiar. She is utterly lost. Medical consults reveal early-onset Alzheimer's.
Alice slowly but inevitably loses memory and connection with reality, as told from her perspective. She gradually loses the ability to follow a conversational thread, the story line of a book, or to recall information she heard just moments before. Genova's debut shows the disease progression through the reactions of others, as Alice does, so readers feel what she feels: a slowly building terror.

I read Still Alice during this fall's readathon and holy wow that's a good book. I've just recently also read Left Neglected by Genova and it seems to be a common denominator for her to write excellently about brain damage.

Still Alice is the story of a woman whose brain betrays her and slowly crumbles thanks to Alzheimer's. Alice had it all before; the busy life of a brilliant professor, researcher and lecturer, the busy life of a mother to 3 grown children and the busy life of a similarly busy husband who also works at Harvard - it was a life she loved and a life she could in no way continue having once the disease hit.

What's so brilliant about this book besides the whole extremely well written and engaging part, is the fact that it teaches the reader a lot about life, about coping with a life-altering disease such as Alzheimer's and about Alzheimer's in general. About how you're still you deep down, even if your body and your brain don't allow you to express that anymore. About how Alice was Still Alice.
The book also beautifully portrays how the world around an Alzheimer's patient reacts. How even though it's only in the early onset stages people start to withdraw, because they don't understand or aren't willing to. Friends and co-workers unable to handle the changes. How the family reacts. The children worrying they'll get it too through genetics. The husband suddenly faced with being married to an entirely different person than the intelligent career woman he fell in love with. But Alice is still Alice, deep down, and she's just as frustrated as every body else.

Read this book before you forget.

STILL ALICE by Lisa Genova ISBN13: 9781847375230 293 pages / Published in 2009

Review by Iben Jakobsen, BoB, 2014