Thank you to Lisa Genova, Empathy Warrior, Author and Neuroscientist, for joining me on my podcast!

Lisa’s mission: “My purpose in my writing is to humanize and to engender empathy and compassion for people who have neurological issues.” Ask yourself like Lisa does: “what would I do if I didn’t have to care about money or what anyone thought?”

  Enjoy our interview on your favorite PODCAST platform or the transcript below: Lisa Niver: This is Lisa Niver from We Said Go Travel. And I am so honored and delighted and excited to have the most incredible author, neuroscientist, Mom, yogi here with me today, Lisa Genova. Thank you for being here. Lisa Genova: Lisa, thank you so much. I love your energy and your generosity. It’s so fun to know you. Lisa Niver: Thank you. First of all, you have a PhD from Harvard in neuroscience. People know you write about neuroscience and you bring these incredible realistic characters into our lives. So, one of the questions I personally have for you, and I’ve loved your books forever, is what came first? Were you always a writer and then you were a neuroscientist? How did this evolve that you’re at the top of excellence in both of these amazing hard challenging fields? Lisa Genova: Oh, my goodness, thank you. I had zero desire or inkling to write most of my life. I was a geeky, nerdy scientist always and very laser focused on that and driven since I was 18. I decided I wanted to be a neuroscientist when I was young, when I was 18, right away in college, and studied that. It was called biopsychology back then. It’s now a neuroscience major as an undergraduate, but that didn’t exist yet because I’m that old. I got a job as a lab tech in a neuroscience lab at Mass General Hospital in Boston right out of college working on the molecular basis of drug addiction. I went on to get my PhD and I studied that at Harvard and I was a fellow at the NIH. And then I still had no idea I was going to be a writer, but my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and right about that time that I got my degree. And as the neuroscientist in my very big Italian family, I was not her caregiver. She had nine children, so we had lots of people to help with caring for her. But I could learn about Alzheimer’s and pass that education on to my family to help us be better caregivers. And everything I read, it was helpful. I read the neuroscience and that was interesting to me, not helpful to my family, but I read about the disease management and how to be a caregiver. I knew the worlds of Alzheimer’s and yet what was missing from it was the perspective of the person who has it. At the time everything was written by a scientist, a clinician, a caregiver or social worker and not from the perspective of someone who has the disease. And what I recognized in myself was I felt a lot of sympathy for my grandmother, and a lot of sympathy for us who loved her and we were losing her right in front of us. So, I felt bad for her and bad for us and sympathy is a disconnect–she’s otherized. So, I felt bad for her, but I didn’t feel empathy. I didn’t know how to feel with her. I was very uncomfortable around my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s. I loved her so much and it was really heartbreaking to watch her lose access to her entire life’s history and not know who we were. And I remember thinking, well, fiction is a place where you get to walk in someone else’s shoes, and feel empathy for someone else’s experience and at the time that kind of story didn’t exist about Alzheimer’s. And I thought, maybe someday I’ll write it. And I don’t know how to write. That will be when I’m retired some day and the very fast pace of my professional life has slowed down. My first child was born in 2000 and I quit my job. I didn’t intend to quit right away, I thought I’ll take six months to a year off. And then my marriage started to unravel, and I didn’t go back to work, and I was trying to fix my marriage. I had been with my first husband since I was in college, and I was 33 at the time when we got divorced. It was upsetting for me to get divorced. My life had been on a very linear, check all the boxes, I’m doing all the things “right” and now I have this sort of upheaval on what I had framed as a failure. And I was heartbroken and upset and really afraid of an uncertain future. But the fear, luckily, turned into a curiosity and I started asking myself good questions, — what’s my future going to look like? What if I could do anything I wanted? At first, I thought I’ll just go back to work. But then I thought, what if I could do anything I wanted? and I didn’t have to care about what anyone thought of me? And the answer, the thing that just kept bubbling up was you want to write the book. Lisa Niver: Wow. Lisa Genova: I tried like hell to talk myself out of it, because I don’t know how to write, I’m a neuroscientist, I don’t write fiction. This is not a safe, stable choice for you right now, girl, you are a divorced, unemployed single Mom. But it was the answer every time I asked myself what would I do if I didn’t have to care about money or what anyone thought? And it was I want to write this book. So, against all sort of reason and sort of you know the logical thing, because it was wildly illogical, I dropped my daughter off at preschool and began doing the research for the book that would become Still Alice. Lisa Niver: Oh, my goodness, I’m so glad you shared that with us. Because your books have helped, inspired and educated so many families about so many terrifying, confusing diseases. But I think that for all the people like me who get divorced and feel like complete failures and think what am I going to do now? And what a brilliant question to ask, what would I do if I didn’t care what anyone else thought? Lisa Genova: I felt so much shame and fear and that question was really liberating. I still ask myself that on a regular basis, am I living the life I really want to live? And if not, why? Sometimes there’s practical reasons that you can’t, but are there baby steps? My whole life changed because of that. I didn’t have any writing background, and I became a student again. I read lots of books on craft. And I didn’t know any other writers, which turned out to be helpful, because I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I didn’t know how hard it is, and I didn’t know how bleak that it can be and how difficult is to get published. And you know a bit about how hard that can be. I didn’t know and so I was sort of blissfully unaware. And I would go into bookstores and libraries and look at all of the thousands of books and think all of those people wrote books, why can’t I? Why not me? It helped, getting out of my own way that was the hardest part of writing the book. It was giving myself permission to do it. Lisa Niver: Oh, my gosh that is exactly the way all people start in something new. But how incredible that your “I think I might give myself permission to do this” turned into a New York Times best seller and a movie where the actress won the 2015 Oscar. Lisa Genova: Yeah, it’s bananas. And Lisa, it didn’t start that way either though, because I wrote the book and then no one would publish it. Lisa Niver: Oh. Lisa Genova: There was no one to represent it. I sent out query letters to a hundred literary agents and I heard back no in a form letter, Dear author, no thank you, from most. I got three responses saying we’ll read the manuscript. One, I never heard back from and the other two thought that Alzheimer’s was just too scary and too depressing of a topic for fiction readers. They thought people would shy away from it and that it just wasn’t marketable, so I had really hit a dead end. It was stick the book in the drawer and go back to neuroscience, the bench or consulting or biotech. Or, and this was the summer of 2007, I self-published it. And I sold it out of the trunk of my car. This is before Facebook, social media was MySpace and Shelfari. It was very limited, but I used that. I was giving myself one year, because I thought if I’m like those contestants for American Idol who are auditioning and can’t sing, but think they can sing, I’ve got to get my life going. I have to earn a living, if this doesn’t work I have to get going here. I was giving myself a year and in 10 months — word of mouth lead to a literary agent who took me on and she sold the book to Simon & Schuster. It ended up being this book that’s been translated into 37 languages and Julianne Moore has an Oscar. So, it’s such a fun story to tell. Your mouth is hanging open. I went from selling out of the trunk of my car, I was begging people to read it.

Lisa Niver: Oh, my goodness. I think it’s so important that people hear that– obviously at this point where you have potential movie deals for three more books. There’s an Oscar from one of the movies. Your TED talk has been watched by eight million people. But it’s hard sometimes to remember that everybody starts at the beginning, and that a hundred agents really ignored you and I mean, gosh, would it be fun to write them all now. But don’t do that — that’s bitter, you’re not bitter.

Lisa Genova: No, no, no. But it’s like that scene from Pretty Woman when Julia Roberts goes back to the store where the woman wouldn’t wait on her and she’s says–you work on commission, right? I still hear that to this day, Lisa. There are people who will come up to me and say everyone tells me that your book is beautiful and it’s helped them, but I just can’t go near it yet. It’s too close and I can’t do it. It’s just too upsetting right now. And I understand that. There is that element of this book, this topic, this subject– it’s heavy, it’s hard for folks depending on where you are in the journey. If Alzheimer’s is in your life it can be hard to read this book. It takes courage.

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