”As the disease worsens and continues to steal pieces of what she’d always thought of as her self, we see her discover that she is more than what she can remember.” - Lisa Genova on her character, Alice.

Still Alice was one of those book that will forever leave its fingerprint on me. A story about losing one’s memory, it was an unforgettable book about a truly memorable character.

Lisa Genova’s debut book explored what it was like for Alice Howland, a 50-year-old Harvard psychology professor, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. The book opened as Alice began experiencing moments of forgetfulness – small slips in her language and sense of orientation – that she marked off as side effects of menopause. After finally seeing her doctor, Alice received the most devastating and surprising diagnosis – one that would change her life forever.

Told exclusively from Alice’s viewpoint, I watched Alice go through all stages of grief about her diagnosis. Then, I read page after page as Alice struggled with her disease. Never before have I been so close to a character who was declining like this. It was heart-breaking but enlightening.

Last spring, my father was diagnosed with mixed dementia – a troublesome combination of vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s. I chose this book because I wanted some insight on how this disease affected the person. We hear so much about the caregivers and families, but what about the person with Alzheimer’s? After reading this book, I have gained a better understanding about the Alzheimer’s patient – who is still a person, a man, my dad.

Even if you’ve been fortunate enough to not have dementia in your personal circle, I still can’t recommend Still Alice enough. Its depiction of the human side of Alzheimer’s was touching and memorable. I laughed with Alice at her blunders, raged when her husband and kids became insensitive, rooted for her while she hung on to her last threads of memory, and cried when she realized that life is not about what you remember but what you loved. That’s a lesson for all of us to remember. ( )

not a subject I was interested in reading about; but it was fascinating and I loved the novel format. ( )

This was a scary book because the character of Alice Howland, PhD. tells her own story of noticing memory problems and realizing that she has Alsheimer's. ( )

One of my book groups chose this for this month's book. When I heard what we would be reading, I wrinkled my nose and sighed. This was a book I intended to give a miss as it just didn't much interest me and had such potential for the treacle that was evident in Nicholas Sparks' The Notebook (a book I loathed). I can't begin to explain how glad I am that I was forced to read this. The group's discussion was more personal than focused on the book but the book is really well done and viscerally effecting.

Alice is a Harvard professor whose specialty is cognitive psychology, specifically in the way that we make langauge. She is well respected in her field and frequently off giving speeches at conferences. Her husband is also a Harvard professor and their children are grown and pursuing their own lives. So when Alice starts to forget small things, she chalks it up to stress, tiredness, or perhaps even menopause, knowing that her symptoms are indeed normal for any of these situations. But when she goes out for a run and gets lost in harvard Square, a place she has been in countless times on countless days, she knows that she should see a doctor, still hoping that she'll be told that everything is normal and knowing that it isn't.

As Alice starts down the path of a probably diagnosis of Early Onset Alzheimer's disease, followed by genetic confirmation, Genova continues to have Alice herself narrate the story so the reader lives the denial, poignancy, and helplessness of the patient rather than the caregiver. And this decision adds to the power of the novel. Alice is a very intelligent woman. She knows exactly what she's losing, and it's more than her memories. It's the sense of herself and those things that make her uniquely Alice. In the early stages of the disease, she tells of her relationship with her grown children, and especially her youngest daughter, the family rebel. There is no suggestion that Alice has been the perfect mother, she details her failings honestly and believably, but it is the imperfect mother that they had whom each of her children wants to hold onto.

This is not a handbook on how to handle a loved one's descent into the fog of Alzheimer's. It is a powerful and heartbreaking look at the breakdown of the person, the family, and the relationships with outsiders that Alzheimer's strips from its victims. Alice's intention to leave this world before she can't answer her touchstone questions, the questions which define her sense of self is shattering, understandable, and begs the question of who a person is if those things that defined them, internally and externally are all gone.

Genova's novel is really exquisitely done. The characters are human, with the failings and frustrations of real people. And Alice is, of course, the central character, showing the reader, through the eyes of the afflicted, the great extent of this horrible disease. Each of the women in my book group who had had a family member affected by this disease, early onset or not was grateful for the insight into the mind of the sufferer, even when that insight was necessarily painful. And all of us admitted to sobbing in the end. This disease ravages so many, those with the diease and those caring for someone with the disease. It truly is a thief and Genova has shone a light on the great need for better understanding, more research, and ultimately a cure. Highly recommended. ( )

Alice Howland is 50 years old, the mother of three grown children and a prominent professor of psychology and linguistics at Harvard, when she finds herself lost and disoriented while out running one day. She's been forgetful lately too, but she's been attributing her mental lapses and other slip-ups to menopause and 'normal' aging; now she wonders if it's something else. After she sees a neurologist, she learns that it is indeed something else; her tests come back indicating a probable diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's, and a genetic screening confirms that she does have the accompanying mutation. Drugs are prescribed that may help slow the progression, but Alzheimer's is incurable and unstoppable, and Alice's life will never be the same. Little by little, and all too soon, she will lose nearly everything that has made her who she is.

Lisa Genova, a neuroscientist by training who originally self-published this novel, has done a remarkable job of truly getting inside the mind and emotions of an Alzheimer's patient. She includes a lot of real information about the disease and its effects in ways that don't distract from the story, and she effectively captures its disruption and alteration of family, career, and daily life, but the fact that it's all told from Alice's perspective makes it unique and unforgettable. The reactions of Alice's family and colleagues to her condition rang true, but Genova makes the reader grasp Alice's own reactions too. The instances where the author 'loops' an episode by repeating its opening paragraphs at the end, and when she frames Alice's behavior with someone else's response to it, do an especially good job of illustrating what's happening and making the reader connect with it.

I had postponed reading STILL ALICE because I was pretty sure it would be a difficult book for me, emotionally - and it was, but not quite in the way I expected it to be. It got under my skin, and it's stayed on my mind. It made me sad, although it didn't make me cry; but more than that, it scared the hell out of me. I was engrossed and moved by Alice's story, and I feel that it gave me a lot of insight into Alzheimer's that I didn't have before - but knowing more has made me more afraid of experiencing this than I was before, too. I'm just five years younger than Alice, and not much younger than my mom was when she began to show her own signs of early-onset Alzheimer's - and I DO NOT WANT THIS to happen to me.

I'll be keeping this book, and recommending it to everyone, whether or not their lives have been touched by Alzheimer's - it's frightening, but it's also enlightening, and it's a tremendously worthwhile read.

READ MORE: http://www.3rsblog.com/2009/10/book-t... ( )