The Best Selling Author Speaks to WOMAN.ca

Lisa Genova is superhuman. Or at least that’s what I’ve been telling myself to account for the fact that she has accomplished a few things that I’ve previously written off as impossible.

She is a Harvard Grad with a Ph.D in Neuroscience, a New York Times best-selling author and mother of three. Oh, and she only turned 40 this year.

Her first novel, Still Alice, about a woman’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, received nothing but great reviews and her latest book, Left Neglected, seems to be measuring up nicely.

Lisa is very humble and relaxed about it all. She blushes when I admit I was hooked on her book and confirms her accomplishments like they’re nothing when I ask, wide-eyed and impressed (I have never met a Harvard grad or a New York Times best selling author before).

Lisa lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts and spends every morning working on her craft at the Starbucks down the street from her house. Staying home would mean wanting or having to “do laundry or change a diaper or snuggle a kid or pay bills or eat food out of the fridge,” she says.

She typically only gets 4-5 hours of kid free time each day when she can work and then take some time to breathe by attending her daily yoga class.

Not unlike Sarah Nickerson, the main character in her new novel, Lisa left the competitive, “keeping up with the Joneses” type neighborhood outside of Boston where she lived before moving to the more relaxed Cape Cod to write and raise a family.

After building a successful career with her writing , Lisa has made no plans to return to her neuroscience research. At least not directly. She’s found that writing is a better way of sharing her knowledge and plans on continuing to write about the brain’s functionality for as long as she is passionate about it. Let’s hope that’s a long time.

Have you always known you wanted to write?
No. I had no conscious ambition to be a novelist or writer. I was very much all about math and science. I wanted to be a scientist and that’s exactly what I did. I did brain research for a number of years.
It was back in 1998 when my Grandmother had Alzheimer’s and I read everything I could about it from the molecular to the self-help and I could not find a satisfying answer to the question: “What does it feel like to have this?” It was so heartbreaking and baffling and unnerving to watch my grandmother go through it. I had a hard time staying connected to her because she was sort of deteriorating and losing her own sense of personal history and I said at the time, and I don’t know why I said it, “Someday I would really like to write a novel about someone from Alzheimer’s from her perspective.” That was going to be the answer for me. I was going to be able to answer that question, “what does it feel like to have this?” I don’t know why I immediately jumped to novel writing but it did in fact answer things for me.

And so that is how your first novel, Still Alice, came to be?
Yes. That is how Still Alice came to be.

Have you taken any writing classes? Do you plan to or did you before you began writing?
No. I have never taken a writing class. I’ve read a lot of books on craft, which definitely helped a lot while writing Still Alice. A lot of books like Julia Cameron’s The Artists Way.
But the best thing I did, and I didn’t do it to become a better writer but it absolutely made me a better writer, was take acting classes. While I was writing my first book, which I wasn’t supposed to be writing I was supposed to be working, I wanted to learn how to act so I trained with a group of actors in Boston for a year and a half and I found that everything I was learning as an actress applied beautifully to writing.
Things like, you’re always telling the truth under imaginary circumstances, you’re always raising the stakes as high as possible whenever you can, what do characters want from each other etc.
And then there is the question, “How do you act?” Normally, for socialized adults it’s very difficult to express honest emotion spontaneously in the moment in response to what happens. We premeditate and we block and we inhibit and we have an internal editor that says, “Don’t say that. What would people think?” As an actor you are forced to strip away that internal editor so that you can be emotionally honest. I would do that in acting class and embody this vulnerable, emotional honesty and then go home and write, allowing that emotional spontaneity to come onto the page.

You were saying that your first novel, Still Alice, came from seeing your Grandmother struggle with Alzheimer’s disease and wanting to better understand what it might feel like to be that person. How did your most recent novel, Left Neglected, come to be? How did you know you wanted to explore and write about Left Neglect?
Unlike Still Alice, which came from a deeply personal place, I just knew while I was writing Still Alice that if I got to write another novel I would like to write about someone with Left Neglect.
The reason why is that as a neuroscience student and then as a neuroscientist all those years, I kept coming across all these stories here and there about a person with Left Neglect. It was fascinating to me but the information was so limited. For example, I read about a person who only drew half of a clock, 12 through 6 thinking they’ve drawn the whole clock. Or a person whole only puts muffin cups on the right side of a muffin tin. I kept thinking, “Wait a minute – did you ask the patient what if the time were twenty after 9:00? What would they do? How do they go through life only seeing half of it?”

For those who don’t know, and I’m sure after that question they’ll be just as curious as you were then, what exactly is Left Neglect?
It is a neurological condition usually caused by a hemorrhage or a stroke or traumatic injury to the right side of the brain in which the brain no longer pays attention to anything on the left side of anything. It’s not a paralysis or blindness. Your eyes still see and the parts of your brain responsible for moving and seeing still work but the part of your brain responsible for paying attention and being aware of anything on the left side, is broken. Half the world is gone.

Did you know anyone struggling with Left Neglect?
I didn’t. Until, and this is kind of interesting – Still Alice was originally self-published for ten months because I couldn’t find a publisher for it and right towards the end of that 10 months it got a great review in the Boston Globe. A local Massachusetts author wrote into the Globe columnist saying, “thank you for portraying a self-published author in such a positive way”. The columnist introduced me to that author because she did what I was trying to do. She went from being self-published to getting a book deal. So I spoke to this author, her name is Julia Fox Garrison, and she introduced me to her agent who later became my agent. And shortly after that my book sold to Simon and Schuster. I called Julia to thank her for so generously changing my life and she asked, “Well are you going to write another book?” And I said, “Yeah, my next story is going to be about someone with Left neglect.” There was a big pause on the phone. Then she said, “Lisa, I have Left Neglect”.
Her book is called Don’t Leave Me This Way and it is an amazing story of her surviving a brain hemorrhage when she was 37 and one of her biggest remaining symptoms almost 12 years later is Left Neglect.
We’ve become friends and she has helped me understand this a lot. She was one of the people I interviewed over and over.

Who else did you interview?
Around 8 people who actually have the condition and then I interviewed a lot of the rehabilitation specialists like occupational therapists and physical therapists.
The character that came to be as a result of all that research is Sarah Nickerson, a woman in her thirties who is very intelligent, driven and successful - spreading herself incredibly thin and perhaps valuing the wrong things in life until a devastating car accident results in brain injury and forces her to re-evaluate everything.

Is this a woman you can relate to? Or a woman you are afraid of becoming?
I’m not afraid of becoming her. I think I’ve made choices a few times in my life that have steered me away from becoming too much like Sarah. But I do think that there is this seductive lure in our culture to try and do more and have more and be more and to pack as much as you can in 24 hours. We all take pride in being busy. But I gave up that life a decade ago. I gave up my job when my first daughter was born.

Would you say that Left Neglected is a bit of a warning or cautionary tale for women today? Would you say that what happened to Sarah is an example of what can happen when we push ourselves too much?
Yeah. I can see how easy it would be to become Sarah. I think it’s hard for working moms in particular to take their foot off the gas. Especially when we’re trying to do both – be a mom and work. It’s a really hard goal to have. Almost too much in some ways. We do multi-task from the moment we wake up until the moment our heads hit the pillow.
I hope that when readers are done and they’re chatting about this with their moms or their girlfriends that they take a minute to think about, “how am I like Sarah? Are there ways that I can slow down and simplify? Instead of just driving my car am I on the phone while I’m driving because I’m trying to get something done in those few minutes?”

I love the symbolism of the phone in the novel and how after Sarah’s accident she doesn’t allow her husband to make a quick call in the car when it was something so routine to her previously.
Yes. Thank you. I hope it does help people re-evaluate even the small things they do throughout the course of their day that are probably unnecessary and just become one more thing to do and be stressed out about.

I also love how at the beginning of the novel, before the accident, Sarah constantly mentions her designer clothing, and the type of car she drives. Almost as if these things are symbols of success that she is obsessed with. For example, she mentions her Cartier watch many times but after the accident can’t even see it because it is on her left wrist. It becomes less important to her in a way.
Yes. And she trades with Heidi for a while yet never asks for it back. She doesn’t want it back.

Are there any other symbols that readers should look out for?
The dreams are packed with symbolism. Before the accident Sarah is just barreling ahead, unconscious of so much that is going on in her life and I think for a lot of us, our dreams are the subconscious sort of processing through the things we didn’t pay attention to in our waking life. So I said, “Alright, I’m going to let Sarah’s subconscious just go crazy here. What would her dreams want to tell her?”
For example, when Sarah is being chased through Boston and she climbs up a fire escape to get away and when she gets to the roof and turns around, there’s no one there. The symbolism there is about the race to climb the corporate ladder and what if when you get to the top nobody is even there and there’s no way down.

What was your favourite part about writing Left Neglected?
I loved the research phase. I loved getting to know the people who have Left Neglect and the people who treat it and really understanding, from their perspective, what it is.
The best part about writing it was the humor that Sarah has. When I did the research and I met everyone who has Left Neglect, they all had a sense of humor about it. Except for one woman, they were all well past the point of initial crisis and had this sense of humor about how they live their lives now. And I thought, “Well that’s the truth under these imaginary circumstances. Sarah is eventually going to have a great sense of humor about it”. I hadn’t written humor before and it was so much fun. I was surprised by her reaction to things so many times and would laugh out loud while writing.

What was your least favourite part about writing Left Neglected?
Well, when I first starting writing this book I began it in the omniscient point of view. I thought that once she got in her accident and got Left Neglect I’d be writing about a character who is only aware of the right side of everything so I better have everybody else’s input on what’s going on so the reader can know what’s going on. But about three chapters in I didn’t feel as intimately connected to her as I wanted to.
I didn’t know where the distance was coming from but I wanted her to feel like a girlfriend telling me her story. I figured I should probably be writing it in the first person. So I took a deep breath and I went back and wrote it in the first person. And that was the hardest part about writing this because I had to communicate to the reader what she was not aware of, through her eyes. I’d get stuck here and there but in the end I managed to figure it out.

What are you working on now?
My next book is called Love Anthony and it’s about a boy with severe autism. He’s non-verbal, he doesn’t like to be touched and he doesn’t make eye contact.  The story is told through both his point of view and his mother’s. It’s about his mother and another woman who are connected to him in ways that they don’t yet know. It’s about unconditional love.

Hayley Brehl
		About the author:
		Hayley Brehl obtained her BA in English and Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal. Living there she met designer, Andy The-Anh and assisted him on her days off from poetry class.  That’s when everything changed. She moved back to Toronto and began pursuing a career in fashion. Her favorite things are wedge heels, Indian take-out and her Persian kitten, Moe.
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