Hello everyone, and welcome back to my go to place to vent and share with you my feelings about Lisa Genova’s Inside The O’Briens. This will be my final blog post, so sit back and enjoy the emotional roller coaster ride. Let me start off by saying I am very glad that I chose this book to be my summative novel, since it was probably my favorite book I have read in school. It combined drama, comedy, romance, and also educated me on a disease I had never previously heard of (Huntington’s disease), so I really enjoyed it.
In this part of the novel, Joe O’Brien’s Huntington’s disease (HD) is progressing, and it begins to really take a toll on him and his family. He loses his job as a police officer because he is no longer fit to work, which is a loss that really hurts Joe and leaves him feeling useless. He also becomes much more easily agitated, clumsy, and unable to control his body movements, which are all symptoms of HD. Not only does HD start to really affect Joe, but it also begins to affect his children as well. His oldest son JJ and his daughter Meghan both decide to take the test and turn out to have the HD mutation gene, meaning they have the disease. His other two children, Patrick and Katie do not know. Patrick does not want to know, and Katie is torn and spends her time overthinking whether she should take the test and find out or not. That sounds really familiar doesn’t it? Katie’s behavior and overthinking really reminded me of our favorite Shakespearean character: Hamlet. Katie can not seem to make up her mind, and is trapped in a cycle of fear and doubt. She wants to know, but she does not. This really reminded me of Hamlet from Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet”, who spends the entire play contemplating on whether or not he should take action and avenge his father’s death. Katie and Hamlet’s characters are very similar in the way that they both are paralyzed by their thoughts and fears, and they even share the same way of thinking: “To be or not to be, that is the question. And so far, the answer has been radio silence” (256, Genova). Hamlet wastes time and many opportunities thinking about what he should do, and Katie does the same. She is haunted by the question : “But which one should she choose? That’s the million dollar question. She spends hours every day internally arguing the pros and cons of either decision” (256).
While Katie is trying to decide whether or not she should take the test and find out, her father Joe is making some very important decisions as well. After losing his job, Joe loses hope and falls into depression. He feels useless and pathetic, and begins to wonder “So what’s left for him?… What’s the point? Why put them all through the miserable shame of it all?” (268). Joe feels hopeless, and as result begins to have suicidal thoughts. He comes very close to taking his own life one time, except he is stopped by his wife, Rosie. Joe thinks that there is no point to living, and even describes taking his own life as “His perfect plan. It’s the humane decision” (273). Fortunately, he is talked out of it by Rosie and Katie. Joe’s behavior reminded me of a video I watched recently, titled ” I Jumped Off The Golden Gate Bridge”, where a man named Kevin Hines talks about his experience with mental disorders and his attempted suicide. He talks about why he tried to take his own life, and he describes his thoughts at the time, saying “I thought I was a burden to everyone who loved me”. This reminded me of Joe, since he also feels like he is a burden and an embarrassment to everyone who loves him, and that is one of the reasons why he wanted to kill himself. Both Joe and Kevin are people who have survived and overcame their suicidal thoughts and realized that life is too good to be wasted.
*Here is the video if you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcSUs9iZv-g
One of the reasons why I enjoyed this novel so much is because it really opened my eyes to the reality of living with a disease like HD and having to try your hardest to stay hopeful. Another novel that also made me feel that way is Still Alice, also by Lisa Genova, where a 50 year old woman named Alice Howland finds out she has early-onset Alzheimer’s . The novel goes through her experience and how the disease did not only affect Alice, but it also affected her husband and three children as well. It showed me a glimpse of how it is to live with such a terrible disease like Alzheimer’s, and it educated me more on the disease as well.
Overall, this novel was very enjoyable and captivating, and I really feel like I learned a lot from reading it. Although the ending was not my favorite, since it ends on a cliffhanger and we never find out whether or not Katie has HD, it was still an amazing novel and it opened my eyes to many new things. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did, and thanks for reading!
How did you feel about the novel and the ending? Did you learn something new? Let me know in the comments down below!
Citations:
rolasenglishblog 
Hi Rola, I’ve definitely got to agree with you, Inside the O’Briens is the best book that I’ve read in all of high school. Joe’s depression in Part III the saddest part of the entire novel because he made some great points for ending his life, especially the one where he says that their dog Yaz didn’t suffer. Thankfully, Katie was able to talk him down. In my opinion, what she said to Joe ranks among the most convincing speeches that I’ve ever read, heard or seen. It was so thoughtful and unexpected that it’s like Al Pacino’s speech in the movie Any Given Sunday. After hearing something like that I would follow that person through fire. The only thing that wasn’t as hot as fire in the novel was the ending. I really wanted to see if Katie had Huntington’s but I guess that’s the point of the novel, it doesn’t matter what your genes say, it’s how you live your life. Although, I still think she’s negative. I mean JJ and Meghan already have it, at least spare her. Thanks for writing Rola, it was nice to see what you thought about the final part of the novel.
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Hey Rola! To start, what a flattering image of Hamlet, he has never looked any better. Anyways, throughout this part of the novel especially when reading Katie’s parts, I couldn’t help but compare her to Hamlet as well. It did help that we were reading both books at the same time. However, what Katie was contemplating and what Hamlet was contemplating were two very different things. Hamlet was overthinking murder, Katie was overthinking a test result. Crime or a piece of paper. Granted that piece of paper may or may not have dictated her ultimate fate, it still does not excuse her from being an irritating character. What I found interesting about Joe’s depressing period in the novel was that it was brought on by a medicinal side effect. It was mentioned in the novel that an HD symptom is depression, and one of the medicine he takes has a side effect of depression and suicidal tendencies, which is why his mind wondered to “the humane decision”. Reading what Joe had to go through with HD really made me empathize with all thirty-five thousand people who fill Fenway Park who have Huntington’s. From uncontrollable emotions to uncontrollable body movements to becoming a total vegetable, it is a diseases that isn’t friendly to those who have it and to those who will get it since it is in their genes. Thanks to this novel I am a whole lot more educated on a disease that I never knew existed before I bought the novel. Sure I may have been disappointed at the end when I turned the last page to find out it was a cliffhanger, but I can’t say that effected what my overall thoughts on the novel were. I loved your blog post once again, thank you for never failing to disappoint.
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