Lisa Genova

Matthew McConaughey presenting Julianne Moore with the Oscar® for Best Actress for her performance in "Still Alice" at the 87th Oscars® in 2015.

The author of Still Alice and Inside the O'Briensexplains why it's okay to admit when our lives fall apart.

Alzheimer’s disease begins at the synapse, the space where neurons connect. The biggest bad guy in this disease is a sticky protein called beta-amyloid. Either too much is made or not enough is cleared away, and as beta-amyloid accumulates, it creates a gooey clog in the synapse, preventing the neurons that meet there from communicating.

As her first bestseller was being made into a movie, author Lisa Genova decided on another project after meeting Richard Glatzer, co-director of Still Alice, the film based on Genova’s book about a woman with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. It was September 2013 when they met over dinner to talk about “Alice.”

In her career as an author, Lisa Genova has seen success in two sides of the publishing world: both as a self-published novelist and a traditionally-published author. From struggling to find a publisher and deciding to self publish to landing a six-figure book deal with Simon & Schuster and making The New York Times Best Seller list, Genova shares her publishing journey and professional insights with fellow writers.

Here's a literary parable for the 21st century. Lisa Genova, 38, was a health-care-industry consultant in Belmont, Mass., who wanted to be a novelist, but she couldn't get her book published for love or money. She had a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard, but she couldn't get an agent. "I did what you're supposed to do," she says. "I queried literary agents. I went to writers' conferences and tried to network. I e-mailed editors. Nobody wanted it." So Genova paid $450 to a company called iUniverse and published her book, Still Alice, herself.

When Lisa Genova, a former consultant to pharmaceutical companies, wrote her first novel, Still Alice, a story about a woman with Alzheimer’s disease, she was turned down or ignored by 100 literary agents.

Lisa Genova is a success story of a kind that’s likely to become much more common, said Lev Grossman in Time. The 38-year-old Harvard Ph.D. didn’t listen two years ago when an agent told her she would be committing career suicide if she self-published her first novel. Genova had spent two years researching and writing a first-person fictional account of a highly educated woman’s experience with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Sarah Nickerson is a high-powered working mom with too much on her plate and too little time. One day racing to work and trying to make a phone call, she takes her eyes off the road for a second too long. In the blink of an eye, all the rapidly moving parts of her over-scheduled life come to a screeching halt. A traumatic brain injury completely erases the left side of her world. As she struggles to recover, she discovers that she must embrace a simpler life, and in doing so begins to heal the things she’s left neglected in herself, her family and the world around her.

The Harvard-trained neuroscientist recommends works by Stephen King, Oliver Sacks, and Jean-Dominique Bauby

"I have low expectations for novels about autism, as the autistic characters in popular books like Rules, House Rules, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time are portrayed so negatively -- as inscrutable, unpredictable, unreasonable tyrants around whom fractured, exhausted, resentful families revolve. Those stories do no show my reality -- I adore my autistic son, and our family life is generally happy. So you can imagine my relief in discovering that Lisa Genova's new Love Anthony carries a forthright message of autism acceptance." 

Huntington's disease isn't on the public radar like AIDS, cancer and heart disease. Aside from folk singer Woodie Guthrie, who died of the disease in 1967, Huntington's has no celebrity tie-in, no sexy spokespersons, telethons or million dollar media campaigns to raise awareness and fund research. Until now.

My first year out of college, I worked as a lab technician in a neurobiology lab at Massachusetts General Hospital East researching drug addiction. I was 22 years old in February 1993 when the scientists down the hall began celebrating, puncturing the typically austere bubble of this neuroscience research floor with big emotion. I remember pausing, my pipette hovering ready in hand, waiting for the details of whatever this exciting news was to reach me. I could feel it coming like a wave.

Lisa Genova's improbable journey from neuroscientist to hit novelist includes a storybook scene right out of fiction: sitting at the Academy Awards in joyful tears, watching Julianne Moore win an Oscar for Still Alice.

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"It is beyond surreal that it all happened," says Genova, 44, who self-published Still Alice in 2007 and sold the book out of her car trunk when she couldn't interest a literary agent.