Bill's Reviews > About Alice

Trillin originally wrote this memoir of his wife Alice as a New Yorker piece five years after her untimely death in 2001, and later expanded it into this short book. The cardiac arrest that claimed her was the result of damage from radiation that successfully treated her lung cancer twenty five years earlier. While the medical history is briefly outlined, Trillin focuses more on how the couple dealt pretty stoically with their fears and feelings of anger at the unfairness of life, and on how their heightened awareness of mortality helped them enjoy the time they spent together. A few months before her death, Alice was released from the hospital after a bypass operation just in time to attend a daughter's wedding. The next day, she sent an e-mail to a group of friends.

Toward the end of the e-mail, she said she was safe at home, in the Village, eating comfort food and about to watch The Sopranos and an A. R. Gurney play on television. She closed by saying, "Life doesn't get much better than this."

Trillin clearly adored Alice and, throughout, he proudly describes her many virtues and accomplishments as an educator, writer, editor and muse to her husband, and, most important to her, mother.