Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... About Alice (original 2006; edition 2006)by Calvin Trillin
Work InformationAbout Alice by Calvin Trillin (2006)
Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Loving little memoir that, in less than 150 pages, brings Alice vibrantly to life. ( ) A beautiful tribute by her husband, author Calvin Trillin, after Alice Trillin’s death in 2001. Alice contracted lung cancer in 1976 never having been a smoker and lived another 25 years before hearth disease brought on by radiation treatment for her cancer led to her death. This book is fewer than 100 pages, and if you’re listening to it as I did, is about an hour long. The writing is what you expect from Calvin Trillin—eloquent and witty at the same time. His love for Alice permeates every word of the story. Although I’m sure Alice Trillin knew how much her husband loved her, it’s too bad she wasn’t around to read his adoring tribute to her. If you need a benchmark on which to judge your own marriage, this is it. This is apparently a slightly longer version of the aritcle that ran in the New Yorker in 2006. For such a slim edition, it's a remarkably generous book. Trillin lets the reader see--or makes them feel they see--into his love for his wife. I felt like I knew him and Alice all along throughout their life together. Yet the writing is not at all voyeuristic. I wonder at how he could write such a perfect piece. In 78 pages--short ones at that--, Trillin writes in his perfect way: elegant and succinct writing that is never too writerly or self-conscious and humor ever present. A perfect read. no reviews | add a review
Has as a student's study guideDistinctions
Biography & Autobiography.
Family & Relationships.
Nonfiction.
HTML: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 Alic No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)814.54Literature English (North America) American essays 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |