About Alice

[January 31st, 2007] Everyone who's ever had more than a passing encounter with the writing of essayist and glutton Calvin Trillin knows Alice, his wife and comic foil. We know her as a generous and sensible woman with a "weird predilection" for eating only three meals a day (although she allows a very broad definition of what constitutes an hors d'oeuvre). We know she's a devoted mother who expends much of her energy trying to keep her husband under control. We know she's a chocoholic. We know she died of lung cancer in 2001.

Alice's influence extended even beyond the page. I was a devotee of her Law of Compensatory Cash Flow, which holds that "any money not spent on a luxury you can't afford is the equivalent of windfall income," from a very young age. It wasn't until high-school economics that I realized most people don't count her in the same league as Smith and Marx.

Of course, none of Alice's fans—and we are legion—really knew her at all. Any columnist is bound to turn to his loved ones for material, and Trillin was no exception. Last March he ran an article, "Alice, Off the Page," in the New Yorker, "expanding on—or maybe correcting" what he calls his "sitcom presentation" of Alice as a "dietician in sensible shoes."

The article was wildly successful, eliciting scores of letters from Alice's fans and winning sincere praise from the sort of people who generally loathe everything about that magazine. Now Trillin has published About Alice (Random House, 78 pages, $14.95), an expansion of the New Yorker article that chronicles the history of their marriage, from a chance meeting at a party through illness, parenthood and illness again.

It's a loving and sad portrait of the real Alice, a tireless teacher and activist who never wore sensible shoes in her life, a cancer survivor who devoted her life to helping others survive, and the sort of mother people write songs about. It's also a very long mash note to a lost lover, still so passionate that, had it been written any closer to Alice's death, it would be utterly heartbreaking.

—BEN WATERHOUSE.