Always on my mind ‘MY GRAN INSPIRED STILL ALICE'

HOW FAMILY TRAGEDY TURNED LISA GENOVA INTO A CELEBRATED AUTHOR AND ALZHEIMER’S ADVOCATE

- Fleur Guthrie

Author Lisa Genova’s nana Angie was a fiercely independent “smart little Italian lady”, who had nine children, swam every day, loved to cook and played in a bowling league. Her family knew she was growing forgetful, but didn’t consider it abnormal because, they reasoned, she was just getting old.

That all changed the night the retired 85-year-old grabbed her bowling bag and walked from the home where she lived alone to the bowling alley. It was 4am and pitch black, yet Angie believed it was the middle of the day.

An Alzheimer’s diagnosis followed, and it became obvious Angie was really struggling, says Lisa, who at the time had recently graduated from Harvard University with a PhD in neuroscience. “I didn’t know how to be with her as a granddaughter. I didn’t know how to stay connected with her.”

Chatting to the Weekly from her home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 50-year-old Lisa says she looked for books to help educate her on how others lived with the disease. She didn’t plan to become an author herself, but inspired by Angie, she thought telling a story from the perspective of a person with the disease sounded like a good idea for a book.

The result was her 2007 novel Still Alice, which centred on a fictional psychology professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. It became a movie starring actress Julianne Moore and turned Lisa into a best-selling author and Alzheimer’s advocate. Her TED talk, ‘What you can do to prevent Alzheimer’s’ has been viewed online more than five million times.