Still Alice by Lisa Genova-292 pages
Book Blurb:
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’s slowly but inevitably loses memory and connection with reality, 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.
My Review: 5 stars
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I swore I wouldn’t read this book and I was told it was just so scary and so depressing. As a reviewer/blogger I backed out on the deal with myself as I really shouldn’t be “scared” of any book. I loved this book. I hated this book. Rather than scaring me, this book scarred me. With gut wrenching passion, this author translated for the reader an intimate look into early onset Alzheimer’s disease and the wreckage it can cause for all involved. A beautiful family with the typical disfunction of all families is subjected to their mother’s rapidly progressing disease.
Well told and pitch perfect dialogue makes this a winner of a book. I read a lot and it’s hard to get me to cry. For this one, have some tissue handy.
Quotes I liked:
She wished she’d been his passion.”
– “What if I see you, and I don’t know that you’re my daughter, and I don’t know that you love me?”
“Then, I’ll tell you that I do, and you’ll believe me.” “Alice liked that…..The mother in her believed that the love she had for her daughter was safe from the mayhem in her mind, because it lived in her heart.”
– “My yesterdays are disappearing, and my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment. Some tomorrow soon, I’ll forget that I stood here before you and gave this speech. But just because I’ll forget it some tomorrow doesn’t mean that I didn’t live every second of it today. I will forget today, but that doesn’t mean that today didn’t matter.”
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