When About Alice first appeared as an essay in The New Yorker last year, I remember missing my train stop because I was so engrossed by Trillin’s eulogy and love letter to his late wife. Trillin opens his heart and home to readers as he chronicles his relationship with Alice from their first chance meeting at a party, to their final good-bye when cancer claimed her life after a 20-year remission. Trillin has written about Alice in other books (which I have not read), and he admits that those portrayals may not have been altogether accurate, much to Alice’s amusement. In memoriam, he decides to come clean about the well-heeled woman who inspired his life and much of his work. He still paints scenes of their marriage with a broad-humored brushstroke, but Trillin is careful not to edit the ebbs and flows of their relationship, including his wife’s battle and public crusade against lung cancer.

The book is both sad and celebratory: you feel this widower’s loss deeply, yet he provides hope for all readers that a relationship such as theirs—one of interdependence of minds and hearts—is very possible, and not simply the stuff of fiction or something from a bygone era. For most of the book, Trillin portrays himself as a schlub who lucked out by winning over the whip-smart and always poised Alice. He claims his writing was a means to continually impress her, yet you get the sense that he needn’t have tried so hard: Alice didn’t commit to anything she didn’t feel strongly about.