Alice is a fairly young, Harvard professor with a husband that loves her and three grown children when she discovers that she has early-onset Alzheimer's. The story is told from her perspective as she becomes increasingly aware of her disease's progression.
Growing up, my dad's uncle moved across the street from us and my mom became his primary caregiver. She took care of him long after was reasonable (in my opinion) and that entire experience was on my mind the entire time I was reading this book. Taking care of him affected our small family in ways that I couldn't understand at the time but instead, because I was a teenager, just grew to resent. There was plenty of resentment to go around from everyone. Our family vacations stopped. Even a day trip somewhere was pretty much out of the question. Our life, schedule and overall mood in the house was determined by him and the care we had to provide. And then I went to college, and from what I remember, it got even worse before my mom and dad finally decided it was too much for my mom and moved him into a nursing home. There are still a lot of hard feelings around the whole thing and I would guess there always will be. There was plenty of blame/martyrdom to go around so it really best to avoid the whole topic.
But back to the book. It was heartbreaking to read this story from the perspective of the woman with Alzheimer's. There were times that I even cried. But the title of book, and some of the premise of the story, is that even though she had this horrible disease, she was still herself. Except for that at some point, that isn't really true. Eventually, the person that was once there is completely gone.
Don't take my word for it. I am admitting my known bias. Goodreads reader's have rated the book a 4.24 with over 65,000 ratings. Obviously a lot of people loved this book. I just wasn't one of them.
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