Liane Moriarty’s What Alice Forgot also features a woman named Alice with memory problems, although in this novel Alice’s problems are temporary and have caused her to forget a decade of her life. The book examines how that disease impacts their relationships with one another, and with others outside of their family. Lisa Genova’s Inside the O’Briens features a family in which several members have Huntington’s Disease-which, like Alice Howland’s gene mutation that results in Alzheimer’s, has a strong genetic link.

Furthermore, advances in technology allow Alice to get rapid genetic testing that helps confirm her diagnosis and then helps her children learn whether or not they carry the same mutated gene that results in Alzheimer’s. These newer kinds of technology help her gauge how bad her symptoms have gotten, but the BlackBerry is also used for her to store pieces of information she wants to remember, such as the time of Lydia’s play and important appointments. There is a note attached to the quiz instructing her to go to her laptop and open a certain file if she struggles to answer the questions, and that file holds instructions for her suicide (her plan is to overdose on sleeping medication). This quiz asks questions with answers that would be stored in her long-term memory, which is the last part of her memory that will be affected by Alzheimer’s. Alice frequently uses her BlackBerry to set reminders for herself, but it also serves another purpose: it holds a daily quiz she takes in the morning.

This new technology plays a huge role in Alice’s experience with Alzheimer’s. Still Alice is set in the early 2000s, an era which saw a massive boom in personal technology.

Still alice novel