In Calvin Trillin’s antic tales of family life, Alice 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 will come and take the child.” Now, five years after her death, her husband offers this loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page.
Though it deals with devastating loss, ABOUT ALICE is a love story, chronicling a romance that began at a Manhattan party in December of 1963. In Calvin’s writing, Alice 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 for the wife he adored and for his listeners.