In Lisa Genova's bio she states, "I'm a Harvard-trained Neuroscientist, a Meisner-trained actress, and an entirely untrained writer!" And that's exactly who I would have thought Genova was after reading Still Alice. Like a lot of people, Alzheimer's has touched my life -- is stealing someone from my life right now, making me feel small and helpless -- so I am not unsympathetic to those who suffer and those who care for the sufferers. But no matter how important or heartbreaking the subject matter, I expect much more from a literary treatment than I got from this book.
Genova is a Harvard-trained Neuroscientist: In many ways, Still Alice shows the fingerprints of an academic. It's obvious that the author did a lot of research and interviewed many subjects before writing this book -- and then she put as many of the anecdotes in one story as possible. I'm not familiar with the trajectory of Early Onset Alzheimer's, but one year between Alice being a brilliant professor and a pleasant stranger felt rushed; like the important thing to Genova was to succinctly cram in all the facts. And I can appreciate why Genova the Neuroscientist included as much medical jargon as she did (like amyloid-beta 42 and autosomal dominant genetic mutations), but the repeated inclusion of national associations and websites wasn't organic to the story and made this feel like a doctor's office pamphlet -- or like a PhD's dissertation written in fictional form. And speaking of Harvard, I wonder what students and their parents (who, according to the book, pay $40k/year for tuition) would make of this offhand comment: Emphasis for the faculty at Harvard tipped heavily toward research performance, and so a lot of less than optimal teaching was tolerated, by both the students and the administration.
Genova is a Meisner-trained actress: "Write what you know" is the well known maxim, but having one of Alice's daughters be trained in the Meisner technique and saying, "After the imagery, you lay on the Elijah question…" or "They all studied Stanislavsky or the Method, but I really think Meisner is the most powerful approach to true spontaneity in acting" read as a promotion for the technique instead of an interesting character choice -- and especially since Lydia eventually abandons her artistic principles and applies to Ivy League schools. (And I say this with my own daughter enrolled in Theater Studies at university -- I am not an anti-art Philistine…)
Genova is an entirely untrained writer: I really do admire her enthusiasm -- having written Still Alice but unable to find a publisher, Genova thought to ask the National Alzheimer's Association for an endorsement, and when they did find value in it, she decided to self-publish; initially selling copies out of the trunk of her car. When a publisher did pick her up, though, I wish they had done more editing: Genova uses some unnecessarily obscure language -- "the concatenated moments", "that awkward saccade" -- and there are some grammatical errors that popped at me -- Alice notes a picture of "she and John dancing on their wedding day" -- but these are nuts and bolts complaints. The bigger issue is that I just didn't believe the world that Genova created: As I said, Alzheimer's is a daily concern in my family and if there had been truth and beauty in this book I would have been affected -- but my eyes remained dry and my teeth grew clenched; this was not art.
As noted, Genova obviously did a lot of research before writing Still Alice and this book must ring true to many readers who have rated it higher than I have -- and to them I can only say that I am happy you found more value in this book than I did.
I have written some here about my mother-in-law's worsening Alzheimer's, and one of the reasons why I selected this book to read this week was because of a recent incident.
On Sunday, we went to the Crinklaw farm for their annual Maple Syrup Festival -- we've brought our kids there nearly every year of their lives, trying to make a connection with the down-to-earth members of their extended family -- and this was the first year that their grandparents have been with us in a long time (because of the health problems that prevented the inlaws from wintering in Florida this year).
While we were at the farm, my mother-in-law, Bev, came up to me with tears in her eyes to say that someone had just told her that an old colleague had just died of cancer. Bev told me all about how the woman's parents and some siblings and even one of her children had already been taken by cancer and I commiserated with her -- this was obviously affecting Bev deeply, and she was already making plans to attend the woman's funeral on Wednesday.
The next morning, Bev called me in tears to tell me that she had just opened the paper and saw that a woman she used to work with just died of cancer. She told me again about how cancer had taken so many members of the woman's family, how she was just too young, and was making plans to attend her funeral on Wednesday.
I can't imagine living like that -- experiencing a loss like that over and over again as though for the first time. And I felt uncomfortable commiserating again as though I hadn't already heard of the death; it felt a little false, but I didn't know what else to do (and Dave later agreed that while sometimes we should say, "I've heard this story before", there's no point in cutting off his mother when she's upset and trying to get something off her chest).
I was describing Still Alice to Dave last night, and it was interesting to me that we disagreed on a plot point that I thought Genova actually got right:
Alice and her husband John are both Harvard professors, and like the quote above states, research is more important to them than the actual teaching they do. When Alice is first diagnosed with Alzheimer's, she thinks that if she can just make it through one more year, she and John can take a sabbatical year together -- what will likely be her last months of lucidity. When that year of waiting is nearly up, John tells Alice that he has been offered a position as the head of a research group in New York City, and instead of taking a sabbatical, he intends to take the position and move them both to NYC. At this point, Alice is still herself enough to say that she doesn't want to move, that she thought he was willing to take care of her, and she can't believe that he would do this to her.
As John explains to his disbelieving children, not only did he think that Alice would be so out of it by the time he moved that she wouldn't know what city she was in either way, but he also believed that taking the position would help him find the cure for cancer.
In the end, John moved to NYC alone and his children, along with a hired aide, took care of Alice in their family home. Alice, as predicted, can't recognise any of them by this point.
Dave thought this was a horrible and unbelievable scenario -- after watching his mother take care of her mother when she suffered with Alzheimer's, and knowing that his grandmother took care of her father when he suffered with Alzheimer's, Dave has some expectations around what a family does when someone they love begins to deteriorate. But I don't know if the scenario is all that terrible, especially as Genova writes it.
John has the opportunity to cure cancer -- this isn't someone who doesn't want to take a year off selling widgets; not someone who is worried about losing money or seniority. And he's a science geek -- not the warm and fuzzy type throughout the book, who's to say he's not a social incompetent like Sheldon Cooper? And there are other family members, their kids, who were willing to take care of Alice. And in the end, Alice didn't know the difference between Cambridge and NYC; didn't even know her own kids.
So what was the harm of John going away? I am going to assume that Dave is worried about his own likelihood of getting Alzheimer's one day -- neither he or I have the best memories as it is -- and he takes the idea of abandonment very seriously. Good thing there's no chance of me leaving him to cure cancer.
And the best news of all, could a cure for Alzheimer's be too far off?
