When the MLA convention wrapped up on Saturday, I kissed my friends goodbye and went about performing my usual last-day-in-a-city rites, which are always centered on a bookstore–this time, the downtown Philadelphia Borders. I acquired a copy of Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), a novel many of our postcolonialist candidates had recommended to us, as well as the Joan Didion non-fiction omnibus We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live, released by Everyman this fall. Throwing in some tiny Moleskine notebooks for effect, I paid for my purchases and strode off to the SEPTA station with my heavy suitcase of professional stuff I no longer needed. I was grateful to be back in my jeans and ready for some airplane reading.
As sometimes happens, though, things took a different turn once I reached the airport, where I ended up stuck for a couple more hours than planned. Because getting home from MLA marks the end of my fall semester each year, I felt temporarily grousy about getting bumped to a later flight simply because I’d (apparently) missed a baggage-loading cutoff by three minutes. But within the hour, I knew why it had happened. Waiting to buy a Dr. Pepper in the D terminal’s Hudson News, I looked over to the New Hardback Releases wall and discovered Calvin Trillin’s About Alice, which came out last Tuesday. I almost bought it right there, but when I’m in PHL I prefer to patronize Barbara’s Bookstore. And so that’s where I bought my copy of Trillin’s terribly, beautifully sad (and yet often hilarious) tribute to his wife, who in 2001 died of heart failure (brought on by the heart-weakening radiation that had killed her lung cancer in the 1970s).
Trillin’s book is a very slightly expanded version of “Alice, Off the Page,” an essay published in the March 27, 2006, issue of The New Yorker. I read “Alice, Off the Page” when it first came out last spring. I didn’t know anything about the Trillins; I’ve still not read Calvin Trillin’s Alice books, though I’ve now been reminded of how much the essay made me want to. Though I’d planned to ration it out to myself in small pieces, within the first page, I was hooked and ended up reading it all in one sitting.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I’m writing a book about memoirs of marriages (a subgenre with a long, fascinating history), and that the night I picked up Trillin’s essay, I’d just started rereading George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2)–that supreme (and supremely marital) novel–for probably the sixth time. It’s possible that I was thus one version of Trillin’s right reader. But what makes both “Alice, Off the Page” and its slightly longer successor gripping–and what’s thus prompting me to suggest it to you (along with a work we might consider its compatriot, Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking [2005])–is the suffusive quality of its humanity. A reader need not know a single thing about this work’s author or its subject in order to feel gratitude at having been granted the painful privilege of listening in on someone else’s grieving life–on a small part of what, in Middlemarch, Eliot calls “that roar that lies on the other side of silence.” This work is soaked, though not at all soppy, with love and with longing. It is straightforward and unabashed in its praise of and pride in a beloved woman. It is a wonderful, awful thing to behold, not least because of its deeply textured ordinariness and terrific humor.
In his earlier books, Trillin had already made his love of Alice blazingly legible–enough so that, as he notes in the essay and now the book, “I got a lot of letters like the one from a young woman in New York who wrote that she sometimes looked at her boyfriend and thought, ‘But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?'” (About Alice 6). Trillin has said, simply, that he wrote the New Yorker piece because he “was trying to make [Alice] a real person.” It’s just about as primal and as uncannily haunting a reason as there could be for producing life-writing. This impulse is, in fact, the very reason I’m writing the book I’m writing: in this genre and all its poignant motivations, I’ve found many of the Big Questions (as I call them with my students) I believe we should keep studying, and many of the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. Why do we fall in love? How do we memorialize those we’ve loved and lost? Why do we try again and again to record in writing the fullnesses of human beings, knowing that words will always fail to be full enough? To what extent can writing make someone a real person, even after her death?
In yesterday’s Washington Post, Bob Thompson reported on his recent interview with Trillin. Titled (with terrible but terribly perfect wordplay) “Story of My Wife,” Thompson’s article concludes with a behind-the-scenes look at Trillin’s having come to write “Alice, Off the Page” last winter, at the response it generated when it appeared in March, and at his pleasure in the essay’s book-form publication on the eve of this new year:
His new book […] [is] also something Trillin had no intention of writing.
As the months went by, he says, “people would occasionally ask me, ‘Are-you-going-to-write-about-Alice?’ ” He rushes the words together, conveying the awkwardness of the exchange. “I don’t think so,” he would reply.
Last year, after New Yorker editor David Remnick asked the same question, he changed his mind.
The article took him a few months to write, “a long time compared to, say, going out and doing a murder story.” It got a huge response from widows, widowers and cancer survivors, which Trillin had anticipated, but also from “young, unmarried women, talking about the sort of marriage that they hoped to have.”
If all happy families are alike — well, they wanted the secret of his.
Trillin’s daughters say their father is unusually excited about the book’s publication. Abigail offers what seems a likely explanation.
“I think my mom would have loved it,” she says, “and I think he knows that.” (Washington Post, December 31, 2006)
Now that I’m safely home from Philadelphia and reunited with my books–new and old–I’m ready to dive back again and again into just this complex of love and loss, memorialization and marriage, and I’ve got Calvin Trillin to thank–not only for making that last, unplanned leg of my time in Philadelphia eminently worthwhile but also for having made himself the latest in a long line of self-revelatory spouses whose works both move me and give me much to think and write about. I’d never wish this kind of loss on any person, especially having grown up watching an amazing marriage in action. And so I’m always deeply grateful when people who have lost their lives’ partners find themselves compelled, beautifully and terribly, with pain and with pleasure, to give the rest of us a sense of who those partners were, and of what their missing means.