About Alice
In Calvin Trillin’s antic tales of family life, she was portrayed as the wife who had “a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day” and the mother who thought that if you didn’t go to every performance of your child’s school play, “the county would come and take the child.” Now, five years after her death, her husband offers this loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–his loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–an educator who was equally at home teaching at a university or a drug treatment center, a gifted writer, a stunningly beautiful and thoroughly engaged woman who, in the words of a friend, “managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.”
Though it deals with devastating loss, About Alice is also a love story, chronicling a romance that began at a Manhattan party when Calvin Trillin desperately tried to impress a young woman who “seemed to glow.”
“You have never again been as funny as you were that night,” Alice would say, twenty or thirty years later.
“You mean I peaked in December of 1963?”
“I’m afraid so.”
But he never quit trying to impress her. In his writing, she was sometimes his subject and always his muse. The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”
In that spirit, Calvin Trillin has, with About Alice, created a gift to the wife he adored and to his readers.
Though it deals with devastating loss, About Alice is also a love story, chronicling a romance that began at a Manhattan party when Calvin Trillin desperately tried to impress a young woman who “seemed to glow.”
“You have never again been as funny as you were that night,” Alice would say, twenty or thirty years later.
“You mean I peaked in December of 1963?”
“I’m afraid so.”
But he never quit trying to impress her. In his writing, she was sometimes his subject and always his muse. The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”
In that spirit, Calvin Trillin has, with About Alice, created a gift to the wife he adored and to his readers.
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Community Reviews
About Alice is Calvin Trillin's beautiful, loving tribute to his late wife, Alice. After over forty years together he still speaks of her with that true-love light in his voice, as if she could have done no wrong~and those things she did do which differed from him, which perhaps annoyed him, which perhaps they argued about were just those darling little eccentricities that endeared her to him ever the more.
I don't recall reading any of Trillin's New Yorker pieces before though i'm sure i must have; i do know i haven't read any of his other books. I picked this one up after hearing him on the Diane Rehm Show, and aside from sounding somewhat familiar it sounded very appealing.
Many of my serious relationships have ended just as those lust/infatuation chemicals/hormones are beginning to die out and other feelings of true love, or friendship, or whatever are supposed to be kicking in (or so i've been told). I used to fear that friendship stage, now i can sympathize/commiserate with the girl who wrote to Trillin "that she sometimes looked at her boyfriend and thought 'But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?'"
Or maybe that's all just a bit too mushy/ooggy for me~i do love the sturm und drang just a touch.
Still and all, this is a lovely, quick read~i might just pick up a few more of his books.
I don't recall reading any of Trillin's New Yorker pieces before though i'm sure i must have; i do know i haven't read any of his other books. I picked this one up after hearing him on the Diane Rehm Show, and aside from sounding somewhat familiar it sounded very appealing.
Many of my serious relationships have ended just as those lust/infatuation chemicals/hormones are beginning to die out and other feelings of true love, or friendship, or whatever are supposed to be kicking in (or so i've been told). I used to fear that friendship stage, now i can sympathize/commiserate with the girl who wrote to Trillin "that she sometimes looked at her boyfriend and thought 'But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?'"
Or maybe that's all just a bit too mushy/ooggy for me~i do love the sturm und drang just a touch.
Still and all, this is a lovely, quick read~i might just pick up a few more of his books.
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