Still Alice

by Lisa Genova

Attention, rehearsal, elaboration, or emotional significance was needed if perceived information was to be pushed beyond the recent memory space into longer-term storage, else it would be quickly and naturally discarded with the passage of time. Focusing

Or book club

Alzheimer’s disease.” Alzheimer’s disease. The words knocked the wind out of her. What exactly did he just tell her? She repeated his words in her head. Probable. It gave her the will to inhale, the ability to speak. “So ‘probable’ means that I might not fit the criteria.” “No, we use the word ‘probable’ because the only definitive diagnosis for Alzheimer’s right now is by examining the histology of the brain tissue, which requires either an autopsy or a biopsy, neither of which is a good option for you. It’s a clinical diagnosis. There’s no dementia protein in your blood that can tell us you have it, and we wouldn’t expect to see any brain atrophy on an MRI until much later stages in the disease.”

then I want to talk to your neurologist.” Without looking at her, he got up and went straight into the study, leaving her alone on the couch, hugging her knees, feeling like she needed to throw

no salt, no chaser. And it burned all the way down. She could go on a cocktail of estrogen replacement, Xanax, and Prozac and spend the next six months sleeping twelve hours a day at Canyon Ranch, and it wouldn’t change a

What if she’d known that she carried this gene, this fate, in every cell of her body? Would she have conceived these children or taken precautions to prevent them? Would she have been willing to risk the random roll of meiosis? Her amber eyes, John’s aquiline nose, and her presenilin-1. Of course, now, she couldn’t imagine her life without them. But before she had children, before the experience of that primal and previously inconceivable kind of love that came with them, would she have decided it would be better for everyone not to? Would Anna?