Our group met to talk about Still Alice on Halloween so it as a bit shorter of a discussion than we usually have. We also picked our next set of books which ate up a lot of time. It was bittersweet for me because due to my classes next semester, I’ll be missing the February, March, and April meetings! Sad puppy face.
I wasn’t the only one who felt this book wasn’t very well written. It seemed jerky which, while more appropriate at the end, didn’t make sense at the beginning. It was nice to be inside Alice’s head, though. We could see things happening to her that she sometimes couldn’t see herself.
Alice’s three children finding out if they were carriers was a sticking point for a lot of us. Would Tom have had ‘survivor’s guilt’ for not being a carrier when he knows Anna is and that Lydia might be? He seemed to disappear from the book a bit so it’s hard to tell but we felt it would be hard for him. Genetic testing like the children went has been around for years, some of our members remembering it back to the 1970s. We wondered about the impact of the testing on Anna and Lydia’s insurance rates. Would they have trouble getting coverage? Would it be different for Anna who knows or Lydia who doesn’t? I wondered if knowing she was a carrier affected Anna’s dedication to starting a family. She knows that her children will have to go through what she’s going through with Alice and how hard it will be. Is it better to have children who can help take care of her? I thought that would be hard for her and her husband.
John kept trying to fix everything. He wanted to do what he knew, study and research and was determined it would fix his wife. A few in our group suspected he was having an affair at the beginning with how dedicated he was to be out of the house and how much he avoided Alice. I still think he might have been. But he was a bit underdeveloped so we don’t know much for sure.
When Alice’s Blackberry stopped working, she cried as if on some level she knew what she was losing. She was so close to the level where she couldn’t answer the questions and in reality had gotten some of them wrong already. She seemed to know she was losing something about herself. We noticed that John seemed to have found the questions because on page 266 (our copy), he asks her the questions. If he got her phone working or if he found the Butterfly file, we’re not sure, but he seemed really concerned about Alice not wanting to be around anymore. What would he have done if she said she didn’t want to be there?
One of our members recommended The 36-Hour Day by Nancy Mace as a non-fiction account of caring for an Alzheimer’s patient. This book was unique in sharing from the side of the patient instead of the caregiver and that novelty was appreciated.
Our next meeting is in December and we’ll be discussing The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante. I’m about 1/4 through it now so I’ll be done well in time for the discussion.
Until next time, write on.
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Taking On a World of Words 