Memoir tells us all ‘About Alice’
“About Alice”
by Calvin Trillin (Random House, 96 pages, $14.95)
When Calvin Trillin met his future wife, Alice, at a magazine party in 1963, it’s safe to say he was smitten.
“My first impression was that she looked more alive than anyone I’d ever seen,” he writes in “About Alice,” his new book. “She seemed to glow.”
That glow captured Trillin’s heart; he, in turn, captivated readers for decades with his delightful passages about her in his writing, especially in the foodie adventures in volumes such as “Alice, Let’s Eat.”
As an act in print, the couple became, as one observer noted, like Burns and Allen – only she’s George (the smart one) and he’s Gracie (the ditz).
Alice, sad to say, died in 2001 of cardiac arrest, her heart weakened by radiation treatment for lung cancer. We should be consoling Trillin; instead, he pours a gentle balm on our wounds with this graceful memoir, slightly expanded from a New Yorker article.
“About Alice” is not a tell-all story, or even a spouse-in-painful-decline story a la “Elegy for Iris.” Instead, it’s Trillin’s appreciation for his muse, whom he was lucky enough to marry.
“I showed Alice everything I wrote in rough draft – partly because I valued her opinion but partly because I hoped to impress her,” he writes. “If the piece was meant to be funny, the sound of laughter from the next room was a great reward.”
Alice was not just an appreciative reader; she was an accomplished writer, teacher and educational TV producer herself. Her 1981 article “Of Dragons and Garden Peas: A Cancer Patient Talks to Doctors” in the New England Journal of Medicine has had a long afterlife in medical education.
Yes, this is a glowing portrait. Even the faults that Trillin ascribes to Alice are the right kind of faults: She scolds her husband for gaining weight; she is intensely interested in the lives of their daughters; she crusades against cigarette smoking, reserving her greatest ire for the marketers who were “giving young people – particularly young women – the notion that smoking was a hip way to defy those square goody-goodies sometimes referred to as the smoking police.”
Less than 100 pages, “About Alice” is best read in one sitting. Just make sure you allow yourself time afterward to sigh and to stare wistfully out the window.