This month, it is being performed as a two-person play at Theater for a New Audience. Trillin would later expand that essay into a short and gorgeous book, About Alice, which has now been adapted for the theater.

Five years later, her husband published a stunning remembrance of her in The New Yorker, aiming to present a fuller version of the woman he’d often deployed in his essays as a buttoned-up straight-man - the George Burns character - to his zany and omnivorous Gracie Allen. She died at 63, in 2001, of heart failure precipitated by the intense chemotherapy treatments she’d sustained in her 30s. As he would write in the dedication to that book, nearly everything he composed was written with one reader in mind: Alice.Īlice Stewart Trillin was a writer and educational television producer who battled lung cancer in her late 30s, surviving it and going on to write about the experience, including in a 1981 New England Journal of Medicine article called “ Of Dragons and Garden Peas” that was taught for years at medical schools. Trillin also wrote a book about the difficult path of one of his closeted college friends and published several satirical novels, including one about parking, Tepper Isn’t Going Out.

He covered the school-integration movement in Georgia, and wrote a long running New Yorker column about America, including a lot about what he was eating in America some of those essays, many of them featuring his wife Alice and daughters Abigail and Sarah, would later be compiled in popular books including Alice, Let’s Eat, and American Fried. For almost six decades, Calvin Trillin has been a journalist, writing for The New Yorker, The Nation, and early on, at the short-lived magazine Monocle.

Trillian massacre