Still Alice by Lisa Genova

Or "Book #25! Halfway There! Take It Away, John!"

By about page 75 or so of Still Alice (the fictional story of a well-respected Harvard professor being diagnosed with and slowly succumbing to Alzheimer's disease), I was HATING it. And I mean hating. I was thinking all kinds of snarky things like "Is 'Lisa Genova' really the pen name for somebody's seventh grade English class?!" I snarkly texted my sister "Geez, where's my best selling novel?!" That second one was a little bit arrogant in addition to being snarky. But you get the point. It was a generally arrogant snark-fest of a literary experience. I'm not proud of it, but it happened. Finally, when I could take no more, I thought "Who IS this woman?!" and I flipped to the author's bio on the inside flap. And, my friends, I am here to tell you that the truth makes all things clear.

Lisa Genova, a first-time novelist, holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard University and is an online columnist for the National Alzheimer's Association.

Well, that certainly changed things. Once I adjusted the lens through which I was reading this novel, I enjoyed it considerably more. It's certainly not a fine piece of literature by any means. Instead, Genova is using the medium of fiction literature to reach out and expand our understanding of both the scientific and human aspects of Alzheimer's. And to that end she was successful.

The book is full of information thinly veiled as natural dialogue. For example, one of Alice's friends says to her "Do you know about the Dementia Advocacy and Support Network International? Go to their website: www.dasinternational.org. It's a wonderful site for people like us in early stages and with early-onset to talk, vent, get support, and share information." It gets a little bit tedious in that way that educationally based art often does, but knowing that it is educationally-driven helps make the tediousness more forgivable. I can imagine this novel being extremely comforting to someone who has been affected by Alzheimer's.

It's hard to get past the first-time-novelist-y-ness of it. The characters are very two-dimensional, and all of them talk exactly alike. The metaphors are heavy-handed, and the literary devices Genova employs in her storytelling are inconsistent throughout the novel. Still, the story of a woman losing her memory was quite heartbreaking, and did stir up awareness and empathy, which was undoubtedly Genova's primary goal.

Although Still Alice was certainly not without merits, I feel like I would get a lot more out of reading a non-fiction account of a similar story. I am impatient with fiction when I know that there are true stories out there that would be just as compelling, if not more so.