Azheimer Analysis - Still Alice

Angel Shi

Teacher Michael Bailey

English Literature

17 April 2015

     Told in Alice’s voice, the novel Still Alice depicts how the early onset Alzheimer gradually devoured Dr. Alice Howland like a beast. Shortly before Alice was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer, she was a well-known, ambitious and extremely intelligent psycholinguistic professor in Harvard University. However, everything began falling apart under the attack of Alzheimer. The story followed the journey that Alice fought with Alzheimer, which was ultimately a failure and deeply explored the inside feeling of her. The whole novel introduces medical treatments received by Alice and tough obstacles and stereotype experienced by her. In order to raise the eyebrow of audience, this paper seeks out and explains the author’s background, perspective, and the sources she used, scope of the plot, the connection between the novel and current disease condition in the real world and contribution of this work.

     As a Ph.D in neuroscience from Harvard University in 1998, the author Genova, who is interested in how brains of human beings is organized, studies about the adaptations of neuron affected by the disease. Her interest of learning about Alzheimer, which enabled her to transform to a novelist started from her 85-year-old grandmother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer. Genova not only did abundant researches at Massachusetts General Hospital and National Institutes of Health but also had numerous conversations with clinicians. (Conversation with Genova). During these conversations, her professional knowledge about “molecular biology of Alzheimer”(Conversation with Genova) supported her to ask the right questions and easily understand them.

     The experience of taking care of her grandmother and being a strategy consultant of biotech companies provided Genova more information about Alzheimer. Specifically, the daily behaviors of the author’s grandmother inspired her to write the novel because there existed similarities between her and Alice in the book. Specifically, Genova’s grandmother is an active and independent woman, who took good care of her children after the death of husband like Alice who is renowned for her career. As a result, the whole family of Genova assumed the grandmother’s forgetfulness as a normal sign of getting old. Similarly, John, Alice’s husband chalked the forgetfulness up to Alice’s lack of rest. Both of the patients’ families were reluctant to admit their disease was true. Further, Genova thought it was her responsibility to learn as much as she could about Alzheimer so she could pass the information to her families to help them look after her grandmother better. (Speech about Alzheimer, Genova) As a neuroscientist, Genova devoted herself into learning about how neurons are affected by disease on the molecular level but as she spent more and more time with her grandmother, Genova wondered how the person is affected by the disease on the human and emotional level.(Genova Speech about Alzheimer) In general, the sorrow of the author towards her grandmother’s disease and the hunger that she wanted to know both outside and inside symptoms of Alzheimer promoted Genova to write the book to enable more people understand what the Alzheimer is and how patients feel.