Lisa Genova couldn't find a publisher for her first novel, about an Ivy League linguistics professor dealing with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. So she published it herself in 2007 and sold it out of the trunk of her car. Simon & Schuster eventually picked it up, and Still Alice spent 59 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It was translated into 37 languages and adapted into a 2014 motion picture starring Julianne Moore, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Alice Howland. Genova, who penned the story because she couldn't find anything written from the perspective of someone living with Alzheimer's after her grandmother was diagnosed, had her hunch confirmed: Stories about what it's like to live with conditions such as Alzheimer's were sorely needed. With a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard University, she thought, This is what I can do. After four more novels — about ALS, autism, traumatic brain injury and Huntington's disease — and a nonfiction book about memory, Genova turned her attention to mental illness. In Genova's new novel, More or Less Maddy, New York University student Maddy Banks rejects the stability and approval that a traditional career might bring to pursue standup comedy while navigating the effects bipolar disorder has on her relationships, identity and goals. More or Less Maddy hit bookstores on Tuesday. This Thursday, January 16, Pentangle Arts presents a special screening of Still Alice at Woodstock Town Hall Theatre. Then on Friday, January 17, Genova, who lives on Cape Cod, visits the theater to discuss the new book with Woodstock-based neurologist, neuroscientist and novelist Melodie Winawer. The talk is presented by the Bookstock literary festival in partnership with the Yankee Bookshop and Pentangle Arts. "This definitely is not going to be dry," Winawer said of the upcoming talk. "We have, in some ways, even though our books are extremely different, a similar passion, which is to use fiction and storytelling to bring understanding to something not only difficult to understand — neurology, neuroscience, psychiatric disease — but also, for some people, very difficult to even think about." Even when writing fiction, Genova presents the science and the medicine factually. "I take it as a very important responsibility to tell the truth under the imagined circumstances," she said. Genova talked with Seven Days about melding neuroscience and novels, an advantage fiction has over nonfiction, and how to take better…