Lisa Genova "If You Could Do Anything You Wanted"

Hello. So this is from a Talk I gave 23 years ago at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Anaheim, California. I was a young, ambitious neuroscientist. So I've long been fascinated with the brain and how it allows us to perceive and think, remember, desire, feel, imagine, move, and talk. And so at the age of 18, I decided I wanted to be a neuroscientist. And that's exactly what I did. So I studied memory loss following stroke at Bates College, and then I went on to get a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard. I studied the molecular basis of drug addiction at the nih and Mass General. So I was a neuroscientist until I became a novelist, which is a really weird thing for a neuroscientist to become. So I want to talk to you today about that story of why I would make such a weird and drastic career change and some of the great lessons I learned along the way. So it started when my grandmother had Alzheimer's, and I, as the neuroscientist in my family, took it as my response to learn as much as I could about Alzheimer's and pass that education along to my family so we could be better caregivers. And so I read everything I could find, and the biology of Alzheimer's really satisfied the neuroscientist in me. And I did learn a ton about caregiving. But as I spent time with my nana, I recognized that the granddaughter in me was really dissatisfied with what I'd learned. I kept wondering, what does it feel like to have this? And I recognized that that was the key to staying connected to her as she forgot who we were. And I recognized that everything that I was reading was written by the point of view of an outsider looking in. So everything was written by a scientist or a clinician or a caregiver or a social worker. And I couldn't get an answer to that question. What does it feel like to have it? And I remember my aha Moment, this great idea that fiction would be a place to an that question. Novels are a place where we can explore empathy, right? So I thought, someday I'm going to write a novel about a woman with Alzheimer's and tell it from her perspective. And for me, that someday was when I'm retired and I've got time and there's no risk, and this would be a nice little hobby. Well, a few things happened in 2000. My daughter was born, and I took some time off from work, wanting to be home with her, planning to be out for about a year in that Time my marriage started to unravel and one year turned into three and the marriage fell apart. And so I was heartbroken and unemployed and divorced. And so up until this point, you really could have plotted my life on a graph. I had always been successful at anything I'd done and I always knew what my life was going to look like. And now suddenly, I'm a dot somewhere off the graph, like I have a failed marriage and I had no idea what my life was going to look like. And this was terrifying to me. I kept asking, what am I going to do? What is my life going to look like? And what followed was fear and crying. Until one day I remember I was pushing my 4 year old daughter on the swing of the playground and this question invaded me. What am I going to do? What's my life going to look like? And somehow it softened. Instead of the fear and the crying that usually followed, it became a curiosity. And actually it actually started to become an exciting possibility. I could create anything and whatever I wanted if I actually dared to. And so the questions kept coming. And so here's the question that changed. If I could do anything I wanted and I didn't have to care about what anyone thought of me, what would I do? And the answer, it came from here, it was write the book. And now my head didn't agree with that at all. So my head launched a lot of excuses and in sort of a very aggressive campaign resisting write the book. And interestingly, the words that sort of follow that from your head will sound, will begin with words like, but I can't, I'm a neuroscientist, I don't know how to write novels. I didn't go to school for that. I should go back to work. I need health insurance. And what will people think of me? They will judge me and laugh at me if I do this right. How much of your life do you spend as a concern for looking good or avoiding looking bad? I can't write a novel. What would my parents think? They would expect me to go back to work as a neuroscientist or a consultant. And then there's the idea of money, power, prestige. I was used to getting these things with anything I did. If I do this thing, if I write a novel, there's no guarantee of any of that. I remember telling my dad that I was thinking of doing this thing, of writing this novel, and he said, okay, don't expect to ever make any money. So the question expands and it's if I could do anything I wanted And I didn't have to worry about what people think of me. And if I didn't have to care about money, what would I do? The answer didn't budge. It was, write the book. And so, against all the excuses in my head, you know, all these reasonable excuses, I did the very unreasonable thing. And I dropped my daughter off at preschool, and I went to the Starbucks and Cushing Square in Belmont, and I began writing still Alice. And I have to be honest with you, it felt like a completely crazy thing to do. Wildly irresponsible. I kept saying, who am I to do this? And, you know, it was terrifying. And just to give you an idea, so it's very clear how far outside my comfort zone I was. I know you can't read this. Don't try. But people will often say to me, well, didn't you do some writing before? And I was like, well, I don't have an mfa. I took one English class my freshman year in college. I didn't journal. I didn't belong to writers groups. But, yeah, I wrote a few things. 5 HT3 receptor activations required for the induction of stridel CFOS and the phosphorylation of ATF1. These are not novels, is the point. So I was really outside my comfort zone. And I kept that panic of, who am I to do this? Kept invading me. In the course of writing this book, I did this thing that really helped. I would walk into libraries and bookstores and look at all the books in front of me, literally thousands of books, and say, well, they did it. Why not me? And I did this exercise many times over the course of the year and a half that I was writing still Alice. And it was every time gave me permission to continue. I also learned that nothing is wasted. So I went through a period of guilt where, oh, I've got this degree in neuroscience. I did all those years of training and education. I'm just abandoning that to do this thing. And it turns out that everything I'd ever done, I used in writing this book. So I have this experience with my nana, who had Alzheimer's. I have this degree in neuroscience that really gave me the credibility I needed to knock on all the doors, to walk through all the doors I knocked on to do the research for this book. So I talked to neurologists and general practice physicians and genetic counselors and came to know 27 people living with Alzheimer's. I also worked as a consultant for a while and gained the confidence I needed to knock on those doors to get in touch with to approach the world's thought leaders on a subject and ask them insightful questions whose answers can't be found in textbooks. Books are on the Internet. Yoga, which has been a part of my life for a long time, has taught me to be comfortable being uncomfortable, so I could stay in that seat in Starbucks and write this novel word by word. Acting. So again, just to make it clear, neuroscientists don't hang out with the drama kids. I'd always wanted to act and never felt like I had the confidence or the permission to try. Well, now I'm being a wildly irresponsible, divorced, unemployed single mom in a coffee shop writing a novel. I figure, the hell I can do anything. So I trained for a year and a half, the exact same time I was writing Still Alice in acting in Boston. And what I didn't know and what I couldn't have imagined or planned is that acting was the best writing class I could have hoped to ever take. The principles of acting apply beautifully to writing things like, you're always telling the truth under the imagined circumstances. What do people want? Who's getting it? Who's not? How are people changed by what happens? How do you express honest emotions spontaneously in the moment in response to what happens? So I write the book in a year and a half, and I do what you're supposed to do next. You're supposed to find a literary agent to represent you who will then find a publishing house to publish you. And so I sent out 100 query letters to these agents. I'm still waiting to hear back from some. I did hear back from pretty much all of them right away. And it was a dear author, we're not interested rejection form. This was an actual handwritten note, which was exciting even though it was a total rejection. It basically said, your book is not marketable in today's fiction market. Four agents wanted to read the manuscript, which was super exciting. One, I'm still waiting to hear from. Two thought Alzheimer's was too scary, too depressing. No one's going to want to read about that. The last one said, you know, You've got this PhD in neuroscience. Why are you writing fiction? Write nonfiction, and then get back to me. So at this point, it was total rejection and failure. Except I didn't see it that way. I remember thinking this was the way to get published. And when I reached a dead end, it was like, well, there must be another way. And so actually, to that last agent, I said, thank you for considering the book. I'm going to go Self publish it. To which he called me on the phone and said, do not do that. You will kill your writing career before it starts. And so with that blessing, I self published Still Alice in the summer of 2007 and sold it from the trunk of my car. I was giving myself one year to go from the trunk to big publishing house. And so this is where inbound marketing happened. I created a website and managed it. I got on social media, which back then was MySpace and Shelf Ari and Goodreads. I blogged for the National Alzheimer's Association. I got that gig by asking them, and they said yes. I hired Kelly and Hall, Book publicity out of Marblehead, and they got the book into the hands of Beverly Beckham at the Boston Globe, who wrote this amazing review in the Sunday paper that led me to author Julia Fox Garrison, who introduced me to her agent, who her agent became my agent. And that agent sold this book to Simon Schuster two months shy of my deadline. Simon and Schuster re released the book six months later. It debuted at number five on the New York Times bestseller list. It spent 59 weeks on that list. It's been translated into 36 languages. There are. Where are we? 2.6 million copies in print. I've since written three more books, all bestsellers about autism, brain injury, and Huntington's disease. Earlier this year, Still Alice became a movie that won Julianne Moore an Oscar. So if you ask me now, what do I do? I would tell you. I'm a novelist who writes stories about people living with neurological diseases and conditions who are ignored, feared, or misunderstood. Stories that generate compassionate awareness and global conversation about topics that people have been previously too afraid of or too ashamed of to mention. And these conversations are fueling social change and generating funding that is leading to advancements in medicine. So I invite all of you to ask this question that created all of this for me, which is, if I could do anything I wanted and I didn't have to impose any. Any limitations on that, what would it be? And I invite you to get to know and explore your answer, because anything is possible. Do what you want to do. Do what you love. This is why you're here. Thank you.