66. About Alice
Rating: ☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Calvin Trillin
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir
96 pages, published December 26, 2006
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
In this very short memoir about his late wife, Calvin Trillin paints a moving portrait of Alice. She was 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.” Trillin tells stories of Alice as 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.” Trillin deeply loved his wife and never quit trying to impress her. The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”
Quotes
“Your children are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary.”
“School plays were invented partly to give parents and easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities.”
“Among married couples the person who actually makes out the mortgage check is likely to be more cautious about spending money than the person who doesn’t. There is something sobering about sending away that much money every month in the knowledge that, rain or shine, you’ll have to come up with the same amount of money the next month and the month after that.”
“For Alice, of course, the measure of how you held up in the face of a life-threatening illness was not how much you changed but how much you stayed the same, in control of your own identity.”
My Take
While it is a very short book, About Alice has an impact on the reader. Calvin Trillin had a long and deep love for his wife Alice and was inspired and moved by her. We can all only hope to have a relationship like that during our time here on earth. Through Trillin’s pen, Alice comes to life in this book and she sounds like someone with something to day that I would be interested in meeting.
