Reading the New Yorker used to be a weekly pleasure of mine. I always looked forward to receiving my copy in the mail and would spend the entire week leafing through its contents. I recently let my subscription lapse and have been on withdrawal since.

I was looking for a book this past weekend in my "library" and found an old copy of the New Yorker that I had saved from March 27th of last year. I kept it because there was a piece in there that had knocked me off my feet. Calvin Trillin, longtime journalist, had written one of the saddest, loveliest, funniest stories I have ever read. I couldn't put it down. And I kept rereading the twelve pages it over and over and over again.

"Alice, Off the Page" was a posthumous love letter that Trillin wrote for his wife who died from cancer five years ago. I was jealous. No man will ever love me the way this man loves his late wife, or at least be able to express it in that way. (The boyfriend loves me, for sure, but he loves me in a sort of Santa Esmeralda "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" kind of way).

I just learned that a slightly expanded version of this essay has been published into "About Alice". I can't wait to get my hands on that book.

Here is the essay as it ran in the New Yorker. It's very, very, VERY long, but definitely worth a read.