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"About Alice, Calvin Trillin's moving tribute to his wife of almost 40 years, is a slender volume that packs a hefty punch. Anyone who wants to know what it might be like to love the same person for most of a lifetime has only to pick up this little book to find out." Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor (read the entire CSM review)
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
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 — 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.
Review:
"Trillin (A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme), a staff writer with the New Yorker since 1963, has often written about the members of his family, notably his wife, Alice, whom he married in 1965. A graduate of Wellesley and Yale, she was a writer and educator who survived a 1976 battle with lung cancer. In 1981, she founded a TV production company, Learning Designs, producing PBS's Behind the Scenes to teach children creative thinking; her book Dear Bruno (1996) was intended to reassure children who had cancer. A weakened heart due to radiation treatments led to her death on September 11, 2001, at age 63. Avoiding expressions of grief, Trillin unveils a straightforward, honest portrait of their marriage and family life in this slim volume, opening with the suggestion that he had previously mischaracterized Alice when he wrote her into 'stories that were essentially sitcoms.' Looking back on their first encounter, he then focuses on her humor, her beauty, her 'child's sense of wonderment,' her relationship with her daughters and her concern for others. Trillin's 12-page 'Alice, Off the Page' was published earlier this year in the New Yorker, and his expansion of his original essay into this touching tribute is certain to stir emotions." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"Trillin (A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme), a staff writer with the New Yorker since 1963, has often written about the members of his family, notably his wife, Alice, whom he married in 1965. A graduate of Wellesley and Yale, she was a writer and educator who survived a 1976 battle with lung cancer. In 1981, she founded a TV production company, Learning Designs, producing PBS's Behind the Scenes to teach children creative thinking; her book Dear Bruno (1996) was intended to reassure children who had cancer. A weakened heart due to radiation treatments led to her death on September 11, 2001, at age 63. Avoiding expressions of grief, Trillin unveils a straightforward, honest portrait of their marriage and family life in this slim volume, opening with the suggestion that he had previously mischaracterized Alice when he wrote her into 'stories that were essentially sitcoms.' Looking back on their first encounter, he then focuses on her humor, her beauty, her 'child's sense of wonderment,' her relationship with her daughters and her concern for others. Trillin's 12-page 'Alice, Off the Page' was published earlier this year in the New Yorker, and his expansion of his original essay into this touching tribute is certain to stir emotions." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"A happy marriage requires compromise. For the journalist, food writer and humorist Calvin Trillin, that meant adhering to his wife's short set of rules: 'Any money not spent on a luxury you can't afford is the equivalent of windfall income.' 'If your child is in a school play ... go to every performance, including the special Thursday matinee for the fourth grade' (otherwise,... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) 'the county will come and take the child'). And limit yourself to three meals a day. That last rule was the onerous one, the one that would have sundered the union had Trillin's wife not had 'a broad view of what constitutes an hors d'oeuvre.' A happy marriage also requires picking the right spouse, and every bittersweet line of 'About Alice,' Trillin's lovely paean to his late wife, proves that he chose wisely. Alice and Calvin met in New York in 1963 at a party for a short-lived satirical magazine called Monocle. 'My first impression' of Alice Stewart, he writes, 'was that she looked more alive than anyone I'd ever seen. She seemed to glow.' One friend later wondered how Trillin managed to land her; another called it 'dumb luck.' They married less than two years later and settled into a New York life of comfort, sophistication and creative success. Trillin had signed on as a staff writer with the New Yorker the year they met (a position he still holds), while Alice taught English at Hofstra University. They had two daughters and refurbished a Greenwich Village town house. As Trillin describes it, there was a steadiness about them, something that had been missing from Alice's own childhood. 'She grew up among prosperous suburbanites in a family that was always in precarious shape financially.' Her father had achieved initial success — and bought a fancy Westchester house with a bowling alley in the basement — by inventing a coin-changer for vending machines, but his company went under around the time Alice was born. Her parents kept the house, though, and rented it out during the summers while Alice was at camp; they holed up in a shabby apartment nearby. Despite the earlier turmoil of Alice's life, the impression that Trillin leaves us with in this elegiac book is that she gave him far more than he gave her. She was his muse, his straight woman, his partner in crime. She played walk-on parts in most of his books — including the recently reissued 'Alice, Let's Eat' (1978) — providing 'the voice of reason, the sensible person who kept everything on an even keel despite the antics of her marginally goofy husband.' She herself described her on-page persona as 'a dietitian in sensible shoes' — not, as Trillin emphasizes, her real personality at all. And yet she didn't mind. She read the first draft of everything he wrote 'partly because I valued her opinion,' Trillin explains, 'but partly because I hoped to impress her. If the piece was meant to be funny, the sound of laughter from the next room was a great reward.' She wasn't easily impressed: 'There were times when I could actually hear a sigh as she read a draft, a sign that the report was not going to be cheerful.' Trillin doesn't discuss his religious beliefs in this book, but it is clear that Alice was his higher moral authority. She believed in helping people — 'anyone she loved,' as Nora Ephron said at her memorial service, 'or liked, or knew, or didn't quite know but knew someone who did, or didn't know from a hole in a wall but had just gotten a telephone call from because they'd found the number in the telephone book.' She was a pioneer in college-level remedial education because 'she always took it for granted that people who wanted to learn could be taught, no matter what their background.' 'About Alice' is a portrait of a woman whose husband still adores her as ardently as when they first met, though she's been dead five years. And as such, Alice at times seems more paragon than real. Trillin portrays her as remarkably beautiful, intelligent and direct — berating a sugar baron at a dinner party about the connection between his product and rotten teeth or explaining to the super-rich that wealth above a certain dollar amount should be confiscated. After she died, a stranger wrote to Trillin that she sometimes looks at her boyfriend and wonders, 'Will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?' Maybe not, but he'd probably love the Alice that Trillin describes. Any man would. This is churlish, though, for 'About Alice' is a love story, one overshadowed by death. In 1976, when she was 38 and her daughters were 4 and 7, Alice was diagnosed with lung cancer (she never smoked, but her parents did) and given a 10 percent chance of survival. But after surgery and extensive radiation, she did survive, for 25 more years. Alice described cancer as a dragon to be slain, and despite a scare in 1990, she and her family thought she had slain hers. She hadn't. 'When Alice's dragon came,' writes Trillin, 'it approached from a direction we hadn't even been guarding. ... She died of the treatment rather than the disease.' The radiation that saved her in 1976 had weakened her heart, which stopped on Sept. 11, 2001. For Alice, and thus for Trillin, the last and most important rule was to be grateful. With this slim book, Trillin is doing his best: 'I know what Alice, the incorrigible and ridiculous optimist, would have said about a deal that allowed her to see her girls grow up: "Twenty-five years! I'm so lucky!" I try to think of it in those terms, too. Some days I can and some days I can't.' Lucky Alice, to inspire such love." Reviewed by Rachel Hartigan Shea, a contributing editor for The Washington Post Book World, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Review:
"If Trillin is remembered years from now, Alice will be too. A small book that betokens a deep, undimmed affection." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"[H]er life bore witness to a profound and encompassing embrace of the meaning of love, which Trillin documents in vivid anecdotes." Booklist
Review:
"Although it's impossible to read this book without aching over the depth of Trillin's loss...for the most part this is simply a warm and gentle tale." Christian Science Monitor
Review:
"[A] short and sweet elegy." Los Angeles Times
Review:
"About Alice is so suffused with love that readers may want to give its as a wedding present with the note, 'This is how it's done.'" Newsday
Review:
"A quick and moving read...a primer on how fleeting, wonderful, cruel and ultimately worthwhile life can be, all at once." Philadelphia Inquirer
Review:
"Yes, this is a glowing portrait. Even the faults that Trillin ascribes to Alice are the right kind of faults....But I don't think Trillin is out to portray Alice as a saint. Rather, he is trying, and largely succeeding, in doing something lyrical: capturing the essence of Alice." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Review:
"In a book replete with anecdotes, Calvin captures Alice's sparkle and spunk." Hartford Courant
Review:
"The prose of Calvin Trillin, witty and light as gossamer, has been harnessed to a sorrow profound enough for Dostoyevsky." Miami Herald
karenlibrarian, January 22, 2011 (view all comments by karenlibrarian)
Short and not exactly bittersweet, but maybe rueful. Trillin paints, in about 75 pages, a portrait of the woman behind the wife in his many books. Alice was a larger-than-life person with talents and flaws, like everyone we love. This is a beautiful little book.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
melinda_ackles, December 8, 2008 (view all comments by melinda_ackles)
A moving collection of memoirs about his deceased wife, Calvin Trillin's About Alice is sure to bring a tear to your eye. And yet, this small book will also make you smile once you realize just how much Calvin loved Alice.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
gail lindekugel, February 18, 2007 (view all comments by gail lindekugel)
Over the years we have traveled and tasted with Alice in Calvin Trillin's tales. I always pictured her as a bit frumpy, well loved, but a sensible mom above all. How wrong I was. Alice, who died on September 11, 2001 of heart failure, was a stunning, elegant AND sensible lady.
About Alice completes the picture of an amazing marriage, an interesting and accomplished woman and the family who loves her. This book is slender but deep in beautiful content, I made myself read it over the course of several days because I didn't want the story to end.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (12 of 20 readers found this comment helpful)
Product details
96 pages
Random House -
English9781400066155
Reviews:
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"Trillin (A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme), a staff writer with the New Yorker since 1963, has often written about the members of his family, notably his wife, Alice, whom he married in 1965. A graduate of Wellesley and Yale, she was a writer and educator who survived a 1976 battle with lung cancer. In 1981, she founded a TV production company, Learning Designs, producing PBS's Behind the Scenes to teach children creative thinking; her book Dear Bruno (1996) was intended to reassure children who had cancer. A weakened heart due to radiation treatments led to her death on September 11, 2001, at age 63. Avoiding expressions of grief, Trillin unveils a straightforward, honest portrait of their marriage and family life in this slim volume, opening with the suggestion that he had previously mischaracterized Alice when he wrote her into 'stories that were essentially sitcoms.' Looking back on their first encounter, he then focuses on her humor, her beauty, her 'child's sense of wonderment,' her relationship with her daughters and her concern for others. Trillin's 12-page 'Alice, Off the Page' was published earlier this year in the New Yorker, and his expansion of his original essay into this touching tribute is certain to stir emotions." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"Trillin (A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme), a staff writer with the New Yorker since 1963, has often written about the members of his family, notably his wife, Alice, whom he married in 1965. A graduate of Wellesley and Yale, she was a writer and educator who survived a 1976 battle with lung cancer. In 1981, she founded a TV production company, Learning Designs, producing PBS's Behind the Scenes to teach children creative thinking; her book Dear Bruno (1996) was intended to reassure children who had cancer. A weakened heart due to radiation treatments led to her death on September 11, 2001, at age 63. Avoiding expressions of grief, Trillin unveils a straightforward, honest portrait of their marriage and family life in this slim volume, opening with the suggestion that he had previously mischaracterized Alice when he wrote her into 'stories that were essentially sitcoms.' Looking back on their first encounter, he then focuses on her humor, her beauty, her 'child's sense of wonderment,' her relationship with her daughters and her concern for others. Trillin's 12-page 'Alice, Off the Page' was published earlier this year in the New Yorker, and his expansion of his original essay into this touching tribute is certain to stir emotions." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review A Day"
by Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor,
"About Alice, Calvin Trillin's moving tribute to his wife of almost 40 years, is a slender volume that packs a hefty punch. Anyone who wants to know what it might be like to love the same person for most of a lifetime has only to pick up this little book to find out." (read the entire CSM review)
"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews,
"If Trillin is remembered years from now, Alice will be too. A small book that betokens a deep, undimmed affection."
"Review"
by Booklist,
"[H]er life bore witness to a profound and encompassing embrace of the meaning of love, which Trillin documents in vivid anecdotes."
"Review"
by Christian Science Monitor,
"Although it's impossible to read this book without aching over the depth of Trillin's loss...for the most part this is simply a warm and gentle tale."
"Review"
by Los Angeles Times,
"[A] short and sweet elegy."
"Review"
by Newsday,
"About Alice is so suffused with love that readers may want to give its as a wedding present with the note, 'This is how it's done.'"
"Review"
by Philadelphia Inquirer,
"A quick and moving read...a primer on how fleeting, wonderful, cruel and ultimately worthwhile life can be, all at once."
"Review"
by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
"Yes, this is a glowing portrait. Even the faults that Trillin ascribes to Alice are the right kind of faults....But I don't think Trillin is out to portray Alice as a saint. Rather, he is trying, and largely succeeding, in doing something lyrical: capturing the essence of Alice."
"Review"
by Hartford Courant,
"In a book replete with anecdotes, Calvin captures Alice's sparkle and spunk."
"Review"
by Miami Herald,
"The prose of Calvin Trillin, witty and light as gossamer, has been harnessed to a sorrow profound enough for Dostoyevsky."
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