>I got some smiles and laughs from that but here is something that better captures my thoughts about men and women. Yeah, I know, I'm a romantic. It's a book review.
>
>"About Alice," by Calvin Trillin; Random ($14.95)
>
>---
>
>The prose of Calvin Trillin, witty and light as gossamer, has been
>harnessed to a sorrow profound enough for Dostoyevsky.
>
>The great American satirist writes of his epic love and epic loss in
>"About Alice" but in the same wry style familiar to readers of The New
>Yorker and The Nation, where for 40 years he has contributed essays, often
>humorous, and poetry, often hilarious, about politics, murder, urban
>living, family life and adventurous eating. But this book is about Alice
>Stewart Trillin. His Alice. The other half of a much admired literary
>couple. And about her death and the hole left in Calvin Trillin's heart.
>
>"About Alice" remembers how she faced serious illness with considerable
>courage and humor and a writer's insight. And it's about the void in
>Trillin's life after her death in 2001. No matter how much humor leavens
>these 78 pages, the effect is as heartbreaking as an overwrought Russian
>tragedy.
>
>The Trillins met in 1963 at a party for a rapidly failing satirical
>magazine "that proved more durable as a marriage brokerage than a
>magazine." The Trillins became one of those famous New York couples. She
>was the writer, editor, educator, TV producer. He was the sophisticated
>writer everyone loved. "About Alice," though, tells us that Trillin's
>essays and novels and poems were all written for an audience of one. The
>dedication of his first book was "For Alice." The dedication of his most
>recent novel: "I wrote this for Alice. Actually I wrote everything for
>Alice."
>
>He was trying to impress his girl. The rest of us, the fans of his work,
>were only interlopers, peeking at the private correspondence of two
>lovers.
>
>Trillin writes that he was utterly dependent on Alice's brutally honest
>criticism and editing. A friend warned that his marriage would be
>healthier if he would forgo Alice's tough advice. He agreed but responded,
>"If I thought that there was any chance I could get along without it, I
>would."
>
>His miniature masterpiece, a slightly longer version of a New Yorker essay
>published in March, recalls Alice's childhood, her literary skills, her
>political philosophy, her child rearing and her notable physical beauty,
>which he said accounted for her knack at getting out of speeding tickets
>with just a warning.
>
>She was outspoken. (Alice once asked New York Gov. George Pataki "Why in
>the world are you a Republican?") Trillin writes, "If we'd had the
>misfortune to live in a milieu that called on me to work my way up in a
>corporation and on Alice to be the supportive and diplomatic and perfectly
>behaved corporate wife, I sometimes told her, I would never have emerged
>from middle management."
>
>When other parents they knew espoused complicated theories on modern child
>rearing, Alice kept it simple: "Your children are either the center of
>your life or they're not, and the rest is just commentary."
>
>"About Alice" chronicles her struggle with lung cancer from 1976, followed
>by another scare in 1990 and finally her fatal heart failure, which
>doctors attributed to damage caused by the radiation treatment that staved
>off cancer. "You could say she died of the treatment rather than the
>disease." Trillin writes that she survived those 25 years after lung
>cancer out of sheer determination to see her two daughters through to
>their marriages. Those same years also gave Trillin readers this exquisite
>little book about a long enduring love affair. And they gave us tears.
>
>After Alice's death, a young woman wrote Trillin to say she would
>sometimes regard her boyfriend and wonder, "But will he love me like
>Calvin loves Alice?" After the publication of "About Alice," that has
>become a test few men could hope to pass.

Very nice!