About Alice

About Alice
by Calvin Trillin, 2006
78pp

There seems to be this weird subgenre of memoirs and appreciations written by New Yorker-style intellectuals about their loved ones taken by cancer. I'm not just thinking about meditations on loss like Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, I'm also including posthumous collections edited and introduced by the surviving spouse, like Timothy Noah editing Marjorie Williams' The Woman at the Washington Zoo, or Sarah Dudley Plimpton writing the intro to George Plimpton's The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair (OK, so that one wasn't cancer). I tend to find these books affecting; I have this idea of this elite set of East Coast intellectuals as living somehow removed from the rest of us, ensconced in the Upper West Side, and literally above our day-to-day concerns. (I have a feeling you could have guessed this about me). So when they write about how they shared their lives with these people, authors and intellectuals like themselves, and how they miss them, I'm reminded not only that they experience good old-fashioned sentiments, families and love-lives; I'm reminded that they aren't so jaded and given to irony as to be incapable of these things, and that moreover they didn't have to give it all up to pursue a life of sophistication.

So I find it moving when a wit like Calvin Trillin publishes a slim volume to tell the world how much he loved his wife, how he went through his whole life thrilled and feeling lucky to be with her. I'm sure that everyone feels that way about his own wife must wish he could write some book that would communicate everything he loves about her, but whose writing skills are up to the task? Trillin's a gifted writer, but the reader doesn't get the privilege of falling in love with Alice the way he did. One does get the impression of having spent some time with an amazing person, though.




Sometimes, a good NPR interview renders the act of reading a particular book unnecessary. I'm pretty sure that with every page of this short book I found myself reminded of what I'd heard in a Bob Edwards interview.