She told herself that an accelerated heart rate and perspiration were part of an orchestrated and appropriate response to running. A black-and-white circular ‘T’ sign directly in front of her marked an entrance to the Red Line trains and buses underground, but there were three such entrances in Harvard Square, and she couldn’t piece together which one of the three this was. She knew all of these places - this square had been her stomping ground for over twenty-five years - but they somehow didn’t fit into a mental map that told her where she lived relative to them. The Harvard Square Hotel, Eastern Mountain Sports, Dickson Bros. She knew she was in Harvard Square, but she didn’t know which way was home. The corridor, the hotel, the stores, the illogically meandering streets. “She wanted to continue walking but stood frozen instead. In one of Alice’s early episodes, she finds herself disoriented and lost in a place as familiar as her own home: Within 320 pages, readers see Alice Howland quickly swing from an admired professor to a confused and dependent patient. In just a few airborne hours, I had inhaled the entire novel, told from the point of view of a renowned Harvard cognitive psychologist who recognizes in herself the symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s. While wondering how I was going to pass the time, I remembered I had downloaded Still Alice, a book which has been on my to-read list for nearly a decade. I found myself on a nine-hour flight with no television, no Internet and all my downloaded films mysteriously deleted from my e-reader.
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