Still Alice by Lisa Genova

My friend Nat read and recommended this book, so I picked it up when it finally returned to the library.

Talk about heartbreaking.

Alice Howland is a professor of psychology at Harvard, has three great children and a stable marriage, but when she begins to forget things, lose things, and then becomes disoriented only a mile from home, she consults the medical profession.

Only to find that, at fifty years old, she has early-onset Alzheimer's Disease.

What follows is Alice's heartbreaking descent into dementia, and is written from her point of view, making the read feel her frustration, her anger, her grasping for words. I found *myself* stressing out about the tests given to test Alice's mental capacity. She eventually gives herself a test on her Blackberry every day, promising her deteriorating self that when she cannot answer the questions on it, she was commit suicide.

This is a smartly written, educational and yes, sad, account of one woman's journey into the shadows...

Labels: book review