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September 2004
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Still Alice, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ambition and Success
Loss of Identity
Illness, Marriage, and Family
Alzheimer’s, Quality of Life, and Happiness
Summary
Analysis
One night in October Alice abruptly awakens, confused about “what to do” and aware that she should be asleep like John. Alice has been having trouble sleeping at night and believes this is because she naps so much during the day. She tries to stop this cycle, but ultimately fails. Alice suddenly remembers her prescription for sleeping pills and goes looking for them downstairs. She empties the contents of drawers and cabinets until John walks downstairs and talks her into going back to bed and resuming her search the next day. In bed, Alice remembers what she was looking for and gets back up and goes downstairs.
This event echoes Alice’s earlier observation about how difficult it was becoming to maintain a regular sleep cycle while she was at Chatham. Alice remembers she has a prescription for sleeping pills, but she does not associate them with her suicide plan, implying that she has actually forgotten the plan on the “Butterfly” file entirely.
Themes
Alice once again sits alone in her office looking out her window with nothing to do. She opens her filing cabinet and looks at her pile of published works, including over 100 articles and dozens of reviews and commentaries. Holding them, Alice feels how heavy the pile is and realizes her “thoughts and opinions carried weight. At least, they used to.” She misses her work and being asked to share her thoughts. She grabs the book she and John wrote together, From Molecules to Mind, which she considers “her proudest written achievement,” but decides she doesn’t feel like reading it.
With no work to continue doing, Alice turns to her past accomplishments and symbols of her former identity as a successful psycholinguistic research scientist. Because of her Alzheimer’s, Alice feels that her thoughts no longer carry weight like they used to. Although she is still capable of analytical thinking, the stigma of Alzheimer’s prevents others from recognizing this in her and treating her with the same respect she is used to receiving.
Themes
Alice decides to take a run home by herself and happily doesn’t get lost. She walks into her kitchen to make some tea but is confused when she reaches into the cabinet that usually holds her tea tin and instead sees stacks of plates. She takes everything out and puts them on the counter and opens another cabinet, but that one doesn’t have her tea, either. She opens every cabinet and empties it without finding her tea. The door opens and, believing it’s John, Alice walks out to ask him why he reorganized the kitchen. Instead, she runs into her neighbor, who tells her she’s in the wrong house. Confused and embarrassed, Alice admits to her that she has Alzheimer’s.
Alice mistakes which house is hers, which becomes an embarrassing situation that forces her to tell a neighbor about her condition. This event also reveals one of the most insidious sides of Alzheimer’s: Alice had been completely confident in her belief that she was in her own house, but she wasn’t. And if she can mistake which house is hers, then she can—and inevitably will—forget which house is hers entirely and become hopelessly lost in her own neighborhood.
Themes
From then on, Alice always checks the refrigerator to make sure it’s hers. There is a large note on the door from John, telling her not to go running alone. Alice “hate[s] depending on him to go running” because he rarely has the energy at the end of the day. She decides to call him to ask if they will run today, but John tells her he’s busy and hangs up. Alice tries “to be understanding,” but is angry that he won’t make time to run with her because it helps “counter the progression of [Alzheimer’s.]” From Alice’s perspective, “John [is] killing her” by not running with her more often.
Both Alice’s insistence on checking the refrigerator and John’s note reflect the growing mistrust they both have in Alice’s ability to recognize her own house. Alice also now depends more on John to be able to go places and do things than she ever has before, to the further detriment of her independent nature. However, John struggles to juggle Alice’s new-found dependence and his career, which reaffirms Alice’s earlier doubts about whether his career would have survived if he had been the primary caregiver of their kids. Alice, however, is not a child, which makes it even more difficult for John to accept her as a dependent. Furthermore, John does not seem to understand how important running is to Alice, especially because she sees it as a way to slow down the progression of Alzheimer’s.
Themes
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Still upset that John won’t be going on a run with her, Alice considers walking somewhere “safe,” like her office. However, she feels “bored, ignored, and alienated in her office.” As a “cognitive psychology professor with a broken cognitive psyche,” Alice believes there isn’t “room” for her at Harvard. So instead, Alice sits in a chair at her house and watches the shadows move until she falls asleep.
Alice no longer feels she has a place at Harvard, but after John’s refusal to come home and run with her she is also beginning to feel like she has no place at home because, like at her office, she is bored and alone, unable to do many of the things she used to love doing.
Themes
Alice sits across the table from a young woman who she knows is Lydia, but she has “a disturbing lack of confidence in this knowledge.” On the other hand, when she looks over at Tom and Anna she can “automatically connect them” with her memories of them. She remembers Lydia’s childhood, but struggles to connect this with the woman in front of her. Alice realizes she can also remember Charlie and wonders why her Alzheimer’s has made her forget her own daughter but not this man she’s only known for a couple of years.
Alice is beginning to experience a serious disconnect between what she knows in her mind and what she sees in reality, and this is particularly illustrated in the “lack of confidence” she has in the knowledge that the woman in front of her is her daughter. More frustratingly, Alice doesn’t struggle to connect the sight of Charlie with her knowledge of him despite being much less close with him, emphasizing the impartiality with which Alzheimer’s destroys the sufferer’s deepest and most personal memories and connections.
Themes
After eating dinner, Lydia tells Alice they want to give her a birthday present: DVDs full of stories told by Anna, Tom, Lydia, and John about their memories of her and each other. There is even an empty disc for Alice to record her own memories so she can watch them whenever she wants to. Alice thanks them and then blows out the candles on her cake.
Alice’s family rightly guesses that what Alice now treasures most is her memories of who they are. But perhaps more importantly, they acknowledge how important it is to Alice that she remember who she really is by including an empty “Alice” disc for her to make her own recording.
Themes
