Thanks to the painfully long commutes I've had recently, I've been flying through books. The one I just finished is called "Still Alice" by Lisa Genova. To be honest, I decided to read the book because I am interested in seeing the movie. Julianne Moore stars as Alice and has received an Oscar nomination for her performance. I feel all books are better than their movie versions, so I wanted to be sure to read it first, before going to the theater.
"Still Alice" is the story of Dr. Alice Howland, a Harvard professor known for her study of linguistics. She and her husband John, also a Harvard professor, live right in the Square and have spent over 25 years in Cambridge. At the age of fifty, Alice is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's.
I haven't personally known anyone with Alzheimer's or dementia, so reading this book was fascinating. There were many moments in Alice's day where things that were once routine, all of a sudden became unfamiliar. For example, Alice is a runner and every single day she'd run through Harvard Square, down along the river and back. One day, on the run, she's at a crosswalk in Harvard Square when she genuinely cannot remember how to get home. That inability to orient herself turns into full on panic.
A few chapters later, Alice is preparing Christmas dinner when she can't remember how to make a dish she's made her whole life without a recipe. That passage reads:
"Alice took out the ingredients for the white chocolate bread pudding and place them on the counter - vanilla extract, a pint of heavy cream, milk, sugar, white chocolate, a loaf of challah bread, and two half-dozen cartons of eggs. A dozen eggs? If the piece of notebook paper with her mother's recipe on it still existed, Alice didn't know where it was. She hadn't needed to refer to it in years. It was a simple recipe, arguably better than Marty's cheesecake, and she'd made it every Christmas Eve since she was a young girl. How many eggs? It had to be more than six, or she would've taken out only one carton. Was it seven, eight, nine?
She tried skipping over the eggs for a moment, but the other ingredients looked just as foreign. Was she supposed to use all of the cream or measure out only some of it? How much sugar? Was she supposed to combine everything all at once or in a particular sequence? What pan did she use? At what temperature did she bake it and for how long? No possibility rang true. The information just wasn't there."
The book follows Alice as her memory and cognition fade, including things like how to open her email, where the bathroom is in her house and the names of her children. In the interview with the author at the back of the book (I always read books cover to cover, including critic reviews, book club questions and these Q&A sessions), Genova says:
"I wondered about the chain of events that were causing the destruction on the inside. And I wondered what it must be like when those parts of the brain that are responsible for your own awareness and identity are no longer accessible. I kept wondering: What is having Alzheimer's disease like from the point of view of the person with Alzheimer's? My grandmother was too far along to communicate an answer to this question, but someone with early-onset, in the early stages, would be able to. This was the seed for Still Alice."
For me, the most interesting element of the book was Alice's relationship with her youngest child, Lydia. Alice's two older children have followed in her and her husband's prestigious foot steps, but Lydia went rogue. She didn't go to college and she moved to Los Angeles to become an actress. As Alice's mind deteriorates, she is actually able to have a more sincere, loving connection with Lydia because her memory loss has rendered her unable to recall all those judgmental thoughts. In the film adaptation, Lydia is played by Kristen Stewart.
I'm not going to lie to you, "Still Alice" is a heavy book. It's not for the faint of heart. However, if you are strong enough to read it, you will have a new appreciation for people living with Alzheimer's and dementia, as well as the family and friends who care for them.
Next up I am starting "Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites" by Kate Christensen.
What are you reading?
