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
In our digital editions
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
arts & entertainment
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
J. Rentilly is a Los Angeles–based journalist.
The Costco
Connection
Still Alice is available
in most Costco warehouses in Blu-ray/
Digital HD. Item
#188571, 5/12. The book is also
available in most warehouses. Item #973281.
A menaced mind
Still Alice follows one woman’s battle with Alzheimer’s
JOJO WHILDEN
MAY 2015 ;e Costco Connection 85
Julianne
Moore