Book: Still Alice
Author: Lisa Genova
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 345
This compelling debut novel tells the tale of a 50 year old celebrated professor at Harvard who finds herself diagnosed with early on-set Alzheimer’s.
Alice Howland is a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a world-renowned expert in linguistics, and the author of a book From Neurons to Nouns. She is married to a medical researcher who adores her. They have three beautiful, successful children, an apartment on the Upper West Side, and a house at the beach. She appears to have it all. Then she gets diagnosed with early on-set Alzheimer’s and with that, her whole life changes.
In Still Alice, you get a look at Alzheimer’s firsthand. You are inside Alice’s head at every step of the way. You follow Alice as she starts grappling with simple problems, forgetting a word mid-speech, populating her sentences with thingy’s, a word she uses to compensate for things she can no longer remember, or forgetting the recipe to a pudding she has made countless times. As Alice’s symptoms get worse, you are drawn into scenes where your heart breaks for Alice as she forgets her daughter, how to lick an ice cream cone, or where the bathroom is in her house.
Alice’s frustration at forgetting words and people is nothing compared to having people avoid her because she is mentally ill. In one poignant scene in the book, Alice wishes she had cancer instead so that she could at least fight it and have people support her through it.
via NorthEast Calling http://ift.tt/1MnKbha
No comments:
Post a Comment