Story of My Wife

Alice taught writing, with special enthusiasm for the kind of student who needed the most help, and went on to produce educational TV programs. The Trillins shared parenting duties to a degree unusual in the 1970s. They also shared Bud's work: He showed Alice rough drafts of everything.

"If the piece was meant to be funny," he writes, "the sound of laughter from the next room was a great reward."

Surely, he's asked, there must have been some points of tension besides the spat over the too-spartan Japanese hotel room he mentions in "About Alice"?

Well -- no. The most serious fight he comes up with has to do with the home-movie musicals the four of them used to make while spending summers in Canada (sample title: "If There's No Nova Scotia in Nova Scotia, There Can't Be Any French Fries in France"). Apparently Bud criticized the way Alice was cutting one movie and "she thought I was saying that she didn't understand humor or something.

"Alice was a very strong-willed person," Edmunds says, "and could be to some people, I suppose, intimidating. I'd include Bud in that."

Trillin puts it a little differently.

When they first met, he writes, he tried his hardest to impress Alice. And in more than 35 years of marriage, he never really stopped.

'Some Kind of Mistake'

When that lung cancer diagnosis came, 30 years ago, Trillin didn't believe it.

"At first, I thought it was just some kind of mistake, or I'm in a nightmare or something like that," he says. "I mean, she was 38 years old, she had never smoked."

He remembers getting angry, driving home from the hospital, at the guys hanging out in Sheridan Square who were "smoking everything they could get their hands on and shooting up."

Why Alice? Why not them ?

But mostly, he coped by refusing to admit that she could actually die. The girls were 7 and 4: It was easier -- and, of course, essential -- to concentrate on being their father. After surgery, radiation and some chemotherapy had given Alice a couple of healthy years, he realized he wasn't thinking about her cancer every day.