STILL ALICE is about a young woman's descent into dementia through early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Alice is a 51 year old psychology professor at Harvard when she starts experiencing moments of forgetting and confusion....she at first attributes these signs to normal aging, too much stress, not enough sleep, and so on. But as things get worse....she eventually sees a neurologist and learns that she has early-onset Alzheimer's."
This was a scary book to read, because I can see little things I do that are similar, and it makes you wonder. I think the author is more of a professor than a writer, but she has found a way to communicate to her audience how the patient feels: how she matters: to herself, her family, her colleagues. The speech Alice gives, starting on page 250 is quite illuminating, as is the conversation with the author at the book's conclusion.
I just didn't feel it was a "novel": it wasn't literary at all, but I understand what the author was trying to do.
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