If most Oscar handicappers are correct, the next Best Actress statuette will go to Julianne Moore for her heartbreaking work as a university professor battling early-onset Alzheimer’s in “Still Alice,” to be released nationally next month. People are examining it with a new candor and empathy. Much of the unwarranted shame surrounding Alzheimer’s has lifted. For a long time afterward, I rejected any impulse to write about the way she went, worried that I’d somehow be dishonoring her.īut the world is different now. She died more than a quarter century ago. And I remember how awful I felt for having that reaction. I remember how mortified I felt for her, how quickly I turned my eyes away. It turned a fastidious woman with a fiendish talent for crosswords into a slovenly one who couldn’t figure out a stoplight.

My grandmother, Kathryn Owen Frier, developed Alzheimer’s. These images are separated not just by years but by illness. If she’s wearing any Jungle Gardenia, I no longer smell it. She’s spilling out of everything and she’s oblivious, a dazed, haunted look in her eyes. So have her slacks, which are wrinkled and smudged. The second image: She’s on the couch in our TV room. It was her armor and ecosystem, the way she told the world and reassured herself that she was a proper lady. We’d meet her at the airport, then drive home in a car suffused with Jungle Gardenia, which wasn’t just her scent. That was how she dressed to fly, back in the days when people actually dressed to fly. The first: She’s coming off a plane, and she’s in a pillbox hat, a tailored suit and white gloves. My maternal grandmother lives in my memory as two distinct images.

Lisa genova new book 2023