In Calvin Trillinβs antic tales of family life, she was portrayed as the wife who had βa weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a dayβ and the mother who thought that if you didnβt go to every performance of your childβs school play, βthe county would come and take the child.β Now, five years after her death, her husband offers this loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the pageβhis loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the pageβan 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, βmanaged 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.β
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 βseemed to glow.β βYou have never again been as funny as you were that night,β Alice would say, twenty or thirty years later. βYou mean I peaked in December of 1963?β βIβm afraid so.β
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, βI wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.β
In that spirit, Calvin Trillin has, with About Alice, created a gift to the wife he adored and to his readers.
Media Buzz
Diane Rehm Show - NPR - November 22, 2007 Day To Day - September 18, 2007 NewsHour with Jim Lehrer - February 15, 2007 Diane Rehm Show - NPR - January 10, 2007 Morning Edition - January 2, 2007 CBS Sunday Morning - December 17, 2006
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