56 pages • 1 hour read
Lisa GenovaStill Alice
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
September 2003-December 2003Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “September 2003”
Alice reads an article submitted for peer review while her husband John frantically searches their home for his glasses, believing he is running late even though the clocks in the house are all different times. Alice sees his glasses on the kitchen countertop and wonders how “someone so smart” could “not see what was right in front of him,” while acknowledging that “many of her own things had taken to hiding” lately (4).
John asks Alice not to fight with their daughter, Lydia, on her upcoming trip to California; she asks him to be sure that he is home when she returns, as they no longer spend much time together, and interprets his response to mean that he will not be. She recalls how they used to walk to Harvard together every morning, and that they no longer do so, in part due to the demands of their work: he has been busy in the lab, and she has been frequently traveling to give guest lectures. She also thinks about her strained relationship with her daughter and wishes that John would support her in their arguments.
The next day, Alice arrives at Stanford University to help kick off its cognitive psychology fall colloquium series as a guest speaker; the department is simultaneously honoring a professor who recently received tenure, and while she normally would not drink prior to her lectures, she has some champagne along with the rest of the guests. She runs into Josh, a former classmate of hers at Harvard, and has a brief conversation with him, but is thankful to have an excuse to get away from him. She is introduced and begins her talk, one with which she is very familiar, but forty minutes into the lecture she struggles to find a word and panics; she replaces it with “thing” and moves on, relieved that no one seems to have noticed, chalking it up to the champagne.
In Los Angeles, Alice arrives at Lydia’s apartment, where they fight briefly about her arrival time; Lydia had written down her arrival time as eight o’clock, while Alice insists that she told her five o’clock. Alice comes in and notes that Lydia looks skinny. Alice hopes that she isn’t dieting. She asks about Lydia’s roommates, noting a flush in Lydia’s face when she mentions Malcolm’s name. In the bathroom, she notes the various products and realizes that she hasn’t had her period all summer and thinks it may be a sign of menopause.
At dinner, they make tense small talk about Lydia’s siblings, father, and life in Los Angeles. Alice does not approve of Lydia’s choice to forego college in favor of acting, and questions both her commitment and her plan; she criticizes Lydia for being irresponsible and once again pushes her to earn a degree. This results in an argument as well as the revelation that John has been paying for Lydia’s acting classes, about which Alice was previously unaware. After they finish eating, as they are leaving, the waiter chases Alice down to give her back her BlackBerry, which she doesn’t recall taking out of her purse.
When she returns to Cambridge, John isn’t home. She sees her running shoes by the door and decides to go for a run, an activity that she treats “as a vital daily necessity” (19), although she had not run on the trip because she had forgotten to pack them. She goes running on the same route she typically runs. However, when she is unexpectedly grabbed by a woman in Harvard Square, she loses her concentration and realizes she is unable to find her way home. After some time, she remembers, and heads back home.
When she gets back home, John is there; she tries to discuss his secretly paying for Lydia’s acting classes, but he pushes the conversation aside, saying he has to get back to the lab and calling her “needy,” which hits her unexpectedly hard (24). After John leaves, she spends some time online looking up symptoms of menopause and decides that she fits the criteria. She makes a mental note to see her doctor, decides to delay the conversation about Lydia until the morning, and resolves to apologize to John. When he returns after midnight, she is able to fall “into a deep sleep, convinced that she [is] safe” (26).
Chapter 2 Summary: “October 2003”
The chapter opens as Alice is finishing a lunch meeting with her graduate student advisee, Dan. As they review his thesis, Alice struggles to recall a reference in Alice’s notes that Dan can’t make out, a skill of memory for which, we are told, Alice is well-known; Alice recalls the reference shortly, still quick enough to impress Dan.
After Dan leaves, Alice checks her to-do list and is surprised to see a task titled simply “Eric” that doesn’t mean anything to her. She runs through possibilities in her head; unable to determine what it might be, she discards the Post-it note and writes a new one. As such lapses and memories are beginning to worry her, she finally decides to schedule an appointment with her doctor.
Later that evening, Alice and John meet their children for Alice’s fiftieth birthday dinner; quick observation tells Alice that Anna, their older daughter, has not yet managed to become pregnant. Anna and her husband Charlie are corporate lawyers, and Alice is worried that Anna is going to hurt her career by rushing things, while Anna feels that there will never be a good time for a professional woman to have children. Alice thinks back to her own early years and remembers feeling jealous as John’s career progressed forward while hers stalled.
Tom, their middle child, arrives; Alice is expecting his girlfriend Jill, as well, but Tom reminds her that he and Jill broke up the month prior. Their talk soon turns to Lydia, who is not present and has not been for some time. We learn that there is something of a rivalry between Anna and Lydia, as Anna’s competitive, but cautious, nature made her jealous of Lydia, for whom academics seemed to come easy. In the meantime, Tom, a medical student, talks with John in depth about his research; Alice simultaneously feels happiness to see John discussing his work so passionately and wistfulness for a time when he used to have those conversations with her.
In the restroom, Alice is amazed by how she looks in the mirror, as she feels her reflection doesn’t match her visual image of herself. Her thoughts drift to her mother and sister, who died when she was young; she tries, and fails, to imagine what her younger sister, Anne, might look like now. When she urinates, she sees blood, which makes her wonder again if it truly is menopause that she is experiencing. Frightened, she begins crying.
Chapter 3 Summary: “November 2003”
Alice meets with her primary care physician, Dr. Moyer, and describes what she’s been experiencing, explaining that she assumes she is simply menopausal. Dr. Moyer reacts quite casually throughout Alice’s explanation until Alice mentions that she also got lost in Harvard Square. She then asks Alice a lengthy series of questions, “each question rapidly on the heels of each answer,” with the topics jumping “from one to the next before Alice [has] had time to follow the reasoning” behind the question (40). Upon completing the questions, Dr. Moyer confirms that Alice is in menopause, but also informs her that she doesn’t believe her memory problems are a result of being menopausal. She asks her to make an appointment for an MRI.
Later, Alice is in her office in William James Hall, “a 210-foot, unimaginative beige block” she believes to be “abysmal” (43); however, she considers the beauty of the view of Boston from her office and how fortunate she is to be able to watch the hustle and bustle of the city from it. After a bit, she consults her to-do list ahead of her trip to Chicago for the Psychonomic Society meeting and takes the time to review her lecture notes, something she continues to do despite that she can “meticulously deliver 75 percent of any given lecture without consciously thinking about it” (45). While preparing, she receives an email from Eric Greenberg reminding her that she still needs to submit three slides for a presentation, which she recognizes as the unfamiliar “Eric” on her to-do list from the previous month.
When Alice arrives to class, she realizes that she can’t remember which lecture she’s supposed to give. She guesses correctly that if she asks what’s on the syllabus for that class period, her students will think it’s an opportunity to demonstrate their engagement and helpfulness. However, since her meeting with Dr. Moyer, each new lapse only makes her more concerned for her mental well-being. That evening, she returns home and calls out to John, who, confused by her presence, reminds her that she was supposed to have been in Chicago for the conference.
When Alice returns to see Dr. Moyer, she learns that her blood work and MRI are both clean. Before Dr. Moyer is finished with her possible options, Alice says she wants to see a neurologist.
Chapter 4 Summary: “December 2003”
Alice and John attend the Eric Wellman’s holiday party, an event to which she looks forward every year, as she considers her colleagues to be family. Dan arrives with his new wife, Beth; when Eric offers to get everyone drinks, Alice requests another despite her glass still being half full. Alice and John spend some time talking to Beth and Dan before Alice excuses herself to use the restroom. On the way there and back, she gets sidetracked, first by the pictures on Eric’s wall, then by the conversation among the wives of her colleagues in the kitchen, to whose conversation she listens, “nodding and smiling…her interest not truly engaged, like running on a treadmill instead of on an actual road” (53). When she returns to her original conversation, she introduces herself to “a young woman in a red dress” (53); when the woman introduces herself again as Beth, Alice first asks if she is a colleague’s new graduate student before Beth reminds her that she is Dan’s wife. Eric and John silently blame the lapse on the wine, so John excuses them for the evening; Alice means to ask why things got awkward, but she instead gets distracted by the newly-falling snow.
Shortly before Christmas, Alice meets with Dr. Davis, a neurologist; after explaining why she’s there to see him, he tells her that in the future she must bring someone with her, which makes her feel “embarrassed, like a child” (55). Dr. Davis, like Dr. Moyer previously, asks her a series of questions about her habits and health, during which we learn that her father was a lifelong alcoholic who died of cirrhosis and was rarely coherent toward the end of his life.
After this series of questions, Dr. Davis asks her to remember a name and address, “John Black, 42 West Street, Brighton” (56). He then asks her a series of factual questions and gives her several short tasks—e.g., “Count backward from one hundred by six” (57). Following the questions, he gives her a brief neurological exam, then asks her to repeat the name and address from earlier; she can remember the name, but not the address. He tells her he doesn’t believe it’s normal memory loss, then orders more tests for her.
On Christmas Eve, Alice flips through photo albums, priding herself in the fact that she can still place them all clearly while John cannot. She raises Lydia’s acting classes again; John agrees that he should have told her but disagrees with her assertion that they should not be paying for her classes at all, arguing that it’s the same as paying for Anna’s and Tom’s education. John excuses himself to go to the lab before picking Lydia up from the airport.
While John is out, Alice devises a memory game for herself based on her knowledge of memory similar to the one Dr. Davis gave her. She begins with the mail, then moves onto series of dictionary words, where she writes down a list of words, memorizes them, performs increasingly longer tasks, then recalls the words. She continues the game throughout the day, happy that she is continually able to remember the words. She is also able to remember the words into the evening, as she prepares Christmas Eve dinner with Lydia. However, as the cacophony of voices grows louder and more frequently insistent on her input, she grows frustrated and begins to have trouble remembering the words. She takes out the ingredients for her mother’s bread pudding, which she has made every Christmas Eve, and finds that she is unable to recall how many eggs go in the recipe. Furious, she begins throwing the eggs into the sink. When Lydia catches her, Alice claims that she’s hot and tired, so Lydia offers to make the bread pudding instead.
“September 2003”-“December 2003” Analysis
These first four months collectively embody Alice’s burgeoning awareness of the problem prior to her formal diagnosis. Even here, we see her rapid decline; in September, she is still capable of travel, guest lectures, and even tracking down John’s glasses; by December, however, she is entirely forgetting conferences she must attend and is unable to recall the recipe for a dessert she has made every year since she was a young girl. At the same time, however, the rapidity of the plot progression masks the slowness of her diagnosis. From the outset, Alice understands that there is a problem; it’s highly likely that the problem began much earlier—in fact, Lydia claims to have noticed a problem beginning in the spring of 2003—but we join Alice at the same time she becomes cognizant of it. She first meets with her primary care physician toward the beginning of November, yet by the end of the year, she still has not received a formal diagnosis, and she will not receive one until more than halfway through January. Much later in the novel, Alice will argue for earlier detection and diagnosis, so it’s worth keeping this delay in mind.
Many themes and motifs are established in these first few chapters, as well. Alice’s world is one in which there is a rather loose understanding of time: in the first chapter, for example, we learn that the clocks in the Howland household all read a different time; throughout the novel, as Alice’s affliction progresses, time becomes more fluid, and clocks become haunting figures in her life. Family, too, is established as a matter of importance in several ways: through the deaths of her mother and sister, the accompanying disdain for her father, her perceived loss of closeness with her husband, and her varying degrees of closeness with her children. Later, Alice will ask who she is if not a Harvard professor, but it’s telling that so much of these first four chapters focuses not on her profession but on her family.
To that end, though, her children represent three different “ages” of development in a turbulent time period. Anna, the oldest, is married, established in her career, and trying for children; Tom, the middle child, is still establishing his career and frequently between girlfriends; Lydia, the youngest, is, to some extent, still figuring herself out. Much of the narrative that follows demonstrates a reversion of Alice from a fierce, established Harvard professor to—in her mind—a child. As a result, it makes it interesting that she seems to be closest (or, at least, most sympathetic) to Anna at the start and furthest from Lydia, both geographically and emotionally, whereas this flip-flops as Alice reverts.
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