- Title:
- Inside the O’Briens
- By:
- Lisa Genova
- Pages:
- 343
- Rating:
- 3
Joe O’Brien is a forty-four-year-old police officer from the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A devoted husband, proud father of four children in their twenties, and respected officer, Joe begins experiencing bouts of disorganized thinking, uncharacteristic temper outbursts, and strange, involuntary movements. He initially attributes these episodes to the stress of his job, but as these symptoms worsen, he agrees to see a neurologist and is handed a diagnosis that will change his and his family’s lives forever: Huntington’s Disease.
Huntington’s is a lethal neurodegenerative disease with no treatment and no cure. Each of Joe’s four children has a 50 percent chance of inheriting their father’s disease, and a simple blood test can reveal their genetic fate. While watching her potential future in her father’s escalating symptoms, twenty-one-year-old daughter Katie struggles with the questions this test imposes on her young adult life. Does she want to know? What if she’s gene positive? Can she live with the constant anxiety of not knowing?
As Joe’s symptoms worsen and he’s eventually stripped of his badge and more, Joe struggles to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, while Katie and her siblings must find the courage to either live a life “at risk” or learn their fate.
Though lacking the emotional impact for me of some of her other novels, this was still a deeply moving portrayal of what is, without doubt, a horrible disease. I do think part of my distance came from familiarity of the condition in fiction of course (Frameshift is one of my all-time favourite novels). It would make a cracking film, if you could find a lead to do it justice, and any literature that spreads positive disability awareness with such masterful writing is worth celebrating.