The Costco Connection

By J. Rentilly

IN AN ITINERANT childhood driven by her father’s demanding military career, Julianne Moore lived in eight states in as many years, one of the few constants in her life being her love of books. It is a passion that has diminished through the years not at all, the perfect combination of ideas and feelings and syllables as transportive and transformative now as ever.

“I remember, as a little girl, finishing a
book I truly loved and always having the same
thought: The person who wrote this book has
never met me, so how did they know all of
these things about me?” Moore tells The
Connection. “Which is what I think we’re
always trying to do with the stories we tell.
You want to find the thing that’s most univer-
sal, that’s most human, that’s most connective,
and then share that honestly and authenti-
cally. Those are the things that I think inspire
an audience to feel seen, understood,
acknowledged, less alone.”
For Moore—and more than 2 million
other readers—Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel Still
Alice was such a book: a self-published work
of fiction, a first-person account of a 50-year-
old linguistics professor’s rapid spiral into
aphasia and dementia, and her gradual but
relentless loss of identity. The core of the
story was inspired by Genova’s long tenure in
Ivy League neuroscience, her academic pur-
suits made distressingly personal when her
own grandmother was ravaged by Alzheimer’s
in 2000.

“I really try to approach every script I’m offered as a gift, though I might not accept every job I’m offered, and Still Alice touched me on every level,” says Moore, a prolific, 54-year-old veteran of cinema, whose career includes the films Boogie Nights and The Kids Are All Right. In Genova’s book, Moore discovered an invitation to raise awareness of an illness that devastates more than 35 million people worldwide; to indulge her own passion

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Click here to watch the trailer for Still Alice. (See page 13 for details.)

for work that is challenging artistically, intel-
lectually and emotionally; and to lend her
formidable talents to what she calls “a very
unique love story.”
For Genova, writing the book over the
course of five years was a labor of love, “an
almost desperate, but very necessary” pursuit
in the wake of her grandmother’s swift dete-
rioration, penned in the wake of new mother-
hood, the surrender of a Harvard teaching
post and the dissolution of her marriage. Once
the 44-year-old writer had completed the Still
Alice manuscript, her efforts were greeted
with silence or indifference from agents and
publishers alike. Undeterred, she drained her
bank account to publish the book herself, sell-
ing about 1,000 copies “hand to hand, out of
the trunk of my car mostly,” she says.

Then, in 2009, Simon & Schuster picked up rights to the novel, transforming it into an international best-seller, and the film rights were sold to Neon Park, an upstart production company in England. To write and direct the big-screen version of Alice, the company hired Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer, longtime partners in life and work. A few weeks after accepting the job, Glatzer was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease), a terminal illness similar to Alzheimer’s in its ruthless assault on the body’s cognitive functions, speech and muscle control.

Throughout the odyssey, Genova remained optimistic that the novel would be well-served by the filmmakers, delivering her impassioned saga to a wider audience. Her only concern was which actor would—or even could—play Alice Howland. “The only person I could imagine was Julianne Moore,” says Genova.

Still Alice premiered to a rapturous reception at the Toronto International Film Festival before being ushered into

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North American movie theaters last December; it has since earned Moore a wonderland of accolades and trophies, including the 2015 Academy Award for Best Actress. Three weeks after the Oscars ceremony, the 63-year-old Glatzer sadly, if inevitably, succumbed to ALS.

Despite obstacles, Alice’s journey through the looking glass has been sublime, says Genova, whose fourth novel, Inside the O’Briens, was published last month. “What I’m seeing is that this story is really and truly making a difference in the world,” she says. “It’s almost beyond hope—except that it’s what I always hoped.” C