About Alice [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

Calvin Trillin (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 26, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

From 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. (Jan. 2)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Anyone who has devotedly followed Trillin's decades of writing in the New Yorker about matters contemporary knows intimately Trillin's affection for his wife, Alice, who succumbed to lung cancer in 2001. His readers had grown accustomed to Alice's illuminating presence in Trillin's poetry and prose, and they grieved, if more remotely, almost equally deeply, the loss of the writer's companion, lover, and inspiration. This succinct account of Alice's upbringing, their meeting, their romance, their family, and her career beyond that of Trillin's helpmeet, offers glimpses into a multifaceted character. The optimism Alice radiated reflected that of her father, who kept his family together despite business reverses, and her life bore witness to a profound and encompassing embrace of the meaning of love, which Trillin documents in vivid anecdotes. Consonant with the woman's strength and courage, her unaffected outreach to fellow victims of death-dealing disease sets a worthy standard for tender yet honest compassion. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (December 26, 2006)
• ISBN-10: 1400066158
• ASIN: B00275EHMI
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (70 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #841,734 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I WISH I HAD KNOWN HER January 9, 2007

By Gail Cooke HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Audio CD

I wish I had known her. Some five years after her death, The New Yorker magazine writer par excellence Calvin Trillin has penned a loving, touching portrait of his late wife, Alice Stewart Trillin, whom he married in 1965. Mr. Trillin has claimed that his work is not as good since she died as she used to edit his drafts. That's a bit hard to believe as while I've not read all of his articles and books, I have eagerly consumed several and found "About Alice" to be as impeccably crafted as his earlier works. He's a writer blessed with a goodly share of humor, keen observation, and the ability to make even the most everyday things, such as the quest for a parking space, intriguing.

Those who have read Mr. Trillin are familiar with Alice as she has appeared in many of his writings. We believed we knew her. Not really. As Mr. Trillin once noted in looking over the letters of condolence he received. So many felt that they knew her; a fact he believes she'd deny. She felt he portrayed her as a sort of a dietician in sensible shoes.

In fact, he noted this description of her in a speech he once made and was asked whether or not she was in the audience and if so, would she stand? Stand she did without saying a word, simply waving a very expensive high heeled shoe in the air.

She was, as he describes her, a mother who thought that if you didn't go to every performance of your child's school play, "the county will come and take the child." She was warm, extremely intelligent, and generous, sometimes overlooking the inflation in a repairman's bill with, "He doesn't have a very nice life. And we're so lucky."

They were opposites; for him, it was love at first sight and obviously still is. "About Alice" is, of course, about a remarkable woman but it is also the story of a marriage. As read by the one person who should do so, Mr. Trillin, it's a book that should be heard by everyone who is in love, all who were in love, and those who want to be.

- Gail Cooke

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Educator, author, and muse." January 31, 2007

By E. Bukowsky HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Calvin Trillin's heartfelt, touching, and occasionally humorous tribute is an expanded essay about his affection for and appreciation of his late wife, Alice. She was a stunning blonde who turned heads whenever she entered a room, but she never coasted on her good looks. Alice's integrity, character, marvelous sense of humor, unflagging energy, optimism, and down-to-earth personality made her stand out; she had a unique talent for reaching out to others and making her family, friends, and students feel valued and appreciated. Alice was a skilled listener who dispensed detailed advice, consolation, and genuine sympathy when appropriate; she had a gift for relating to people intimately without being sloppily sentimental. She lent a helping hand to "anyone she loved, or liked, or knew, or didn't quite know but knew someone who did, or didn't know from a hole in the wall," said Nora Ephron. Alice wrote letters--what a lost art letter-writing is!--and her letters were works of art.

Trillin married Alice in 1965 and they enjoyed over thirty-five years together until her death on September 11, 2001. At their first meeting in 1963, Calvin was impressed by Alice's radiance. He never stopped trying to impress his wife and she never failed to impress him. Throughout her career, marriage, and even during her courageous battle with lung cancer and later, heart disease, Alice demonstrated that she was not just a pretty face. She was a enormously gifted, intelligent, and creative woman who was gave of herself unstintingly. She taught college kids, drug addicts in rehab, and prisoners in Sing Sing. "She always took it for granted that people who wanted to learn could be taught no matter what their background," and she routinely inspired her students to reach higher than they ever thought they could. She was also a talented writer, editor, and producer for educational television. Above all, Alice was a devoted wife and mother. Her love of family was shatterproof; she was a fiercely protective and involved parent who made sure that her husband and her two daughters, Abigail and Sarah, knew how much she cared for them. Alice may be gone now, but her beautiful legacy lives on.

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful. December 27, 2006

By Peter Thomas Senese - Author.

Format:Hardcover

Putting down Calvin Trillin's 'About Alice' one word came to mind: 'Beautiful'. Writing with deep affection that readers will easily connect to, the author demonstrates through action and his writing the unlimitedness of love and the human spirit. I truly enjoyed this book, written by a provocative author whose writing has influenced many of us.