She’s rather surprised to discover that her career doesn’t actually matter as much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still a blow to her sense of self when Alice has to eventually give up her teaching position at Harvard. She gets lost, has trouble following conversations, and forgets people she’s been introduced to minutes before. The novel traces Alice’s sad deterioration as the disease marches on and leaves her entire family struggling with their new reality. After she completely forgets about an important business trip, Alice makes an appointment with a neurologist, and receives a dire diagnosis: she has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. But as her personal and professional life gets increasingly disrupted by the fractures in her memory, it looks more and more that something serious is at play. When a string of memory disturbances forces her to look for an explanation online, she’s relieved that menopause symptoms seem to cover scattered thinking and memory lapses pretty well. When Alice finds herself lost and disoriented in Harvard Square while out on a run one day, unable to find her way home, she doesn’t give the incident much significance.

The only sources of disquiet is the youngest daughter Lydia, who’s pursuing acting career rather than college education, much to Alice’s dismay, and a nagging feeling that she and her husband John, a fellow Harvard professor, aren’t as close as they used to be. There are grandchildren on the horizon thanks to daughter Anna, a successful corporate lawyer, and son Tom is doing well at the medical school. She’s in the best physical shape of her life thanks to regular running.

She’s a respected professor at Harvard and a world-renowned linguistics expert. I’ve yet to see the film adaptation that bagged Julianne Moore her long-overdue Oscar, but I took the opportunity to check out the original novel about a woman diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.Īlice Howland is in a pretty good place as she approaches her 50th birthday.

Still alice a novel lisa genova