Still Alice is a fictional book about Alice, a highly intelligent professor and researcher, who gets Alzheimer’s disease at the incredibly young age of around fifty.
| Publisher: | July 6, 2007, by iUniverse, Inc. |
| ISBN: | 9780595440092 ISBN10: 0595440096 |
| Characteristics: | 292 pages, Paperback |
| Source: | and returned. |
The book begins taking the reader into Alice’s busy and demanding life. It’s clear that her intelligence is highly valued by her students and colleagues.
The encroachment of the disease on Alice is well expressed in the book. The first sign of trouble is when Alice loses her way on a run doing a route often followed. You feel as lost as her when she forgets how to get home. The memory erasure reaches its peak towards the end of the book when she cannot remember family names. It’s incredibly sad when she refers to her daughters as the woman who’s an actor and the woman with a child.
Reading the end notes, it turns out that “Alice” seems to have been based on the author, who is a renowned American neuroscientist with an interest in Alzheimer’s disease. Lisa Genova’s grandmother suffered from the disease, which gave her the inspiration and material to write the book.
Quotes
I encourage you to empower us, not limit us. If someone
has a spinal cord injury, if someone has lost a limb or has a
functional disability from a stroke, families and professionals
work hard to rehabilitate that person, to find ways to cope
and manage despite these losses.Work with us. Help us develop to function around our losses in memory, language, and cognition. Encourage involvement in support groups. We can help each other, both people with dementia and their caregivers, navigate through this Dr. Seuss land of neither here nor there.
p. 283.
Featured image: Photo by Pixabay.
