Still Alice raises awareness of Alzheimer’s disease

To enrich the intellectual perspective of Fresno County, SJV Town Hall began a monthly series of lectures given by a variety of speakers in 1937. This month, in its 80th season, Lisa Genova, author, neuroscientist and speaker, came to the Town Hall to talk about various mental disorders.

Lisa Genova is an award-winning author who has written four books: Still Alice, Love Anthony, Inside the O’Briens and Left Neglected. These books deal with various diseases that afflict the brain. Still Alice, Genova’s first book, spent more than 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It also attracted critical praise and won the 2008 Bronte Prize, along with the 2011 Bexley Book of the Year.

Lisa Genova spoke about her personal motivations for writing Still Alice.

“With Still Alice I didn’t set out to be a novelist, but my grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and while I could understand it as a neuroscientist, I couldn’t understand it as her granddaughter,” Genova said. “I really wanted to stay connected to her but I didn’t know how. I was very unnerved and baffled and heartbroken by her disease and fiction was a way to explore empathy. So I wrote about Alzheimer’s in honor of my nana.”

The road to publication was not easy for Genova, who, after contacting over 100 publishers, was rejected or ignored by all of them. In response, Genova self-published with iUniverse, and at one point was selling copies of Still Alice out of the trunk of her car.

Her luck turned around, however, when word of mouth allowed her to get a literary agent, who then sold the book to Simon & Schuster. After the book’s immense success, Still Alice was adapted into a film in 2014, for which Julianne Moore won the Academy Award for Best Actress. A stage adaptation in Chicago was also produced, from April 10-May 13, 2013.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/323928446″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”150″ iframe=”true” /]

After writing about Alzheimer’s, Genova turned her attention to other neurological disorders. She spoke about raising awareness for a disease called left neglect through Left Neglected.

“The next book is Left Neglected, it’s about a condition called left neglect,” Genova said. “Left neglect is when you have damage to your right hemisphere either do to a stroke of traumatic brain injury or an aneurysm. The part of your brain that’s responsible for where things are in space. So your eyes work and you’re not paralyzed, but you don’t pay attention to anything on the left side of anything. So you don’t eat food on the left side of your plate and think that you finished your meal.”

Genova also shared her personal motivation for writing Love Anthony, whose main character is affected by autism.

“The next book is Love Anthony and that was a personal one,” Genova said. “My cousin Tracy, who’s like a sister to me, [because] her oldest child and my oldest child are the same age. We became new moms at the same time; it really drew us close. Her son was diagnosed with autism when he was fifteen months old. So I wrote Love Anthony as a way to give a voice to a nonverbal boy with autism.”

Finally, Genova spoke about raising awareness for Huntington’s disease in her book Inside the O’Briens.

“Inside the O’Briens is about Huntington’s disease. Huntington’s is a neurodegenerative disease where you lose control of your movement; you have a hard time controlling your voluntary movements,” Genova said. “I wrote about Huntington’s because a) not many people know about it and there’s no treatment and no cure, and b) my first job out of college, was working as a lab tech, and I was doing research on drug addiction.

“All of a sudden these geeky neuroscientists down the hall start celebrating and cheering and hugging each other,” Genova continued, “and the news trickles down that this team had just isolated the genetic mutation that causes Huntington’s, and I thought, ‘They’re going to cure this disease.’ But here we are, 24 years later, and we still don’t have a treatment for this disease.”

For more articles please read: Dave Barry gives insight, entertains through comedy.

These writers can be reached via Twitter: @Will_VanderKooi, MatthewSue1, and email: Will Vander Kooi, Matthew Sue.