Still Alice

by Lisa Genova

a meeting with him? She consulted her calendar. October eleventh, her birthday. Nothing about Eric. Eric. It was too cryptic. She opened her inbox. Nothing from Eric. She hoped it wasn’t time-sensitive. Irritated, but confident that she’d recover whatever it was about Eric eventually, she threw the reminder list, her fourth one that day, in the trash and pulled off a new Post-it. Eric? Call doctor Memory disturbances like these were rearing their ugly little heads with a frequency that ruffled her. She’d been putting off calling her primary-care physician because she assumed that these kinds of forgetting episodes would simply resolve with time. She hoped she might learn something reassuring about the natural transience of this phase casually from someone she knew, possibly avoiding a visit to the doctor entirely. This was unlikely ever to happen, however, as all of her friends and Harvard colleagues of menopausal age were men. She admitted it was probably time that she sought some real medical advice. ALICE AND JOHN WALKED TOGETHER from campus to Epulae

the tears still spilled out of her overwhelmed