The Fiction Spot
A snapshot review of a book related to the Non-fiction Feature
Also in this Monthly Bulletin:
The Non-fiction Feature: Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
The Product Spot: Lumosity Games
The Pithy Take
Still Alice is the story of a highly accomplished woman slowly sinking into early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, and how it affects her thoughts, feelings, and relationships with friends and family.
It is more jarring than I had expected–Alice’s struggles with her identity every minute. And it is a painful and highly detailed struggle; how is she supposed to feel, how does she feel, and what information is she missing? Yet the author, Lisa Genova, treats Alice’s journey with Alzheimer’s with great kindness, explaining how incredibly frustrating it is to feel as if you are falling short in all regards, but you have no idea how. An excellent, informative, and emotional read.
The words, the information, the meaning in the woman’s questions and in Alice’s own answers were like soap bubbles, the kind children blew out of those little plastic wands, on a windy day….And even if she managed to actually hold a number of them in her sight for some promising duration, it was invariably too soon that pop! they were gone, burst without obvious cause into oblivion, as if they’d never existed.
Still Alice
Author: Lisa Genova
Publisher: Gallery Books
320 pages | 2009
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