Still Alice
Lisa Genova, 2007
Contemporary fiction Psychology
A Harvard cognitive psychologist with early-onset Alzheimer's fights to keep her language, work and family as her mind erases them. The pages carry a quiet dread as memory and identity slip, with tenderness toward family and work.
Feels like dread, tenderness and grief. About memory, identity and family.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you want a close, unsentimental view of a mind losing language and certainty. The subject is painful and the dread is sustained, so it can be heavy going if you want distance from illness and grief.
Why read it
It puts you inside the daily effort to hold onto words, work and family, and asks what remains when memory goes.
A page from the book
A patient's bargain: one illness offers a fight, the other only erasure.
She wished she had cancer instead. She’d trade Alzheimer’s for cancer in a heartbeat. She felt ashamed for wishing this, and it was certainly a pointless bargaining, but she permitted herself the fantasy anyway. With cancer, she’d have something to fight. There was surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. There was the chance that she could win. Her family and the community at Harvard would rally behind her battle and consider it noble. And even if it defeated her in the end, she’d be able to look them knowingly in the eye and say good-bye before she left. Lisa Genova.Lisa Genova has a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard; she self-published Still Alice in 2007 before it became a bestseller.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Still Alice for me?
- You may like it if you want a close, unsentimental view of a mind losing language and certainty. The subject is painful and the dread is sustained, so it can be heavy going if you want distance from illness and grief.
- What is Still Alice like?
- The pages carry a quiet dread as memory and identity slip, with tenderness toward family and work. Feels like dread, tenderness and grief. About memory, identity and family.
- What should I read after Still Alice?
- If you liked Still Alice, try Before I Go to Sleep (S.J. Watson), The Good Girl (Mary Kubica) and A Flicker in the Dark (Stacy Willingham).
A taste of the feed
The particular dread of a long life that leaves nothing behind.
I cannot imagine how I will cope when I discover that my life is behind me, has already happened, and I have nothing to show for it. No treasure house of collection, no wealth of experience, no accumulated wisdom to pass on. What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?
Before I Go to Sleep · S.J. Watson
The relief of letting someone else carry your sadness, just for a moment.
But he holds me so tightly that for a moment, the emotions are at bay. The sadness and fear, the regret and the loathing. He bottles them up inside his arms so that for a split second I don’t have to be the one carrying the weight of them. For this moment, the burden is his.
The Good Girl · Mary Kubica
To confront true darkness is to risk becoming part of what you fear.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that, in the process, he does not become a monster. If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
A Flicker in the Dark · Stacy Willingham
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