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.
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