Calvin Trillin tells a love story “About Alice”

About Alice is a short book. Written by Calvin Trillin to honor is beloved wife, the eponymous Alice, who died five years ago, this slight tome is big of heart and largely a glance back at a woman with whom many readers have become acquainted through Trillin’s sizeable and entertaining body of work. Perhaps it’s because Trillin wrote so often of his wife that he penned fewer than 100 pages about Alice for this volume. Whatever his reasons, the book is a tender homage and a caring portrait of a woman whose life touched many—and no one more than the author. Trillin’s recollections are sentimental, his writing is warm and wry, and his subject comes across as real and not overwrought. The result is a book that introduces readers to a woman we wish we’d really known—or at least could have read about for hundreds of pages more. The result, really, is a look at the depth of Trillin’s love and loss.