TBI Tuesday – Book Review – Still Alice, Lisa Genova

I hate this book. I set it down a dozen times while reading. I’m an American male, you see, who was hit by a car moving 65 mph while I finished a training ride for a bicycle race. Life support pumped air to my lungs for a week, and I lay comatose for five. I vacationed for three months at the hospital. Joyfully, to me, my family spent as much time with me as they could.

All this to say that the story and pains of Still Alice are too real for me. I don’t have to imagine what Alice or her mom suffered through as Mom advanced in her darkness(1). I was lucky: my diagnosis receded instead of advanced, but the pain and slushy brain were all the same.

I identify with Alice, too, knowing that both Alice and her mom were broken, but not always or not completely. Alice’s mom reminds me of my Slovak grandmother as she ebbed in her last days. She made up a language of sorts that was part English, part Slovak, part Russian, and part – a big part, say her Slovak-speaking daughters – gibberish. She stared at Mom as if looking at a cardboard cutout propped against the wall. Clarity always came, though, when she talked to the great-grandchildren. Clarity, but never English. 

If you wonder, I don’t really hate the book. I was drawn to it as much as I hated reading it. I wasn’t aware of Genova before picking it up. She’s a psychologist and neuroscientist and eminently capable of writing the story. As such, the story is well told, though there were times it felt weak, like giving Mom a pass. So be it. It could have been more clinical or cringey, but she does an admirable job of straddling the two. This could not have been easy for her to write.

Four stars. That’s my take. 

Notes:

Here’s a truth I have no answer for: when I was in the hospital, I never hurt, and I saw things all the time. People, auras, bunnies hopping down hospital corridors, and mean things, too. I wonder now, when I’m alone and there’s no one listening, if maybe my brain injury opened something, something I was trained for decades not to see. Doctors tell me I’m healed now, but perhaps that just means the door closed again, that I’m normal, like everyone else who can’t see.

Go here to see the book on Amazon.
Here for the movie, also on Amazon.
Here’s the book on Barnes & Noble.
Go here to Genova’s website.