26 “Dr. Lucie N. Jessner: Psychiatrist, Teacher Dies,” Washington Post, December 23, 1979, B6; AA, “The Loss of Lucie Jessner,” TS, enclosed in AA to HMS, January 1, 1980.
27 N, December 4, 1979.
CHAPTER 23: REWARDS
Interviews: Jean Anderson, Sandy Boucher, Doris Dörrie, Frances Gendlin, Frances Kiernan, Anne Lamott, PAL, Robert McNie Jr., Lynne Sharon Schwartz.
1 N, October 13, 1979.
2 AA to LJ, July 19, 1979, and September 8, 1979; AA interview with Marilyn Scharine.
3 To the Ingram Merrill Foundation in 1964, HMS wrote: “But the parties and the vivid picture one gets of various interiors, always by the well-chosen suggestion of an artist never the appraising eye of an auctioneer, are really only counterpoints to the chaos and devastation which is going on inside this girl who knows, in the best sense, that love is the only important thing in the world.”
4 Lee Upton, “Changing the Past: Alice Adams’ Revisionary Nostalgia,” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 33–44.
5 Laurie Stone, “Shlong Song” (review of RR), Village Voice, November 26, 1980.
6 Ibid.
7 Leona Sherman, “A Conversation with Alice Adams,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, November 20, 1980, 13.
8 Ella Leffland to AA, June 11, 1980.
9 Wayne Warga, “A Sophisticated author gets by with help from her friends,” Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1980.
10 RP to AA, June 19, 1980.
11 Karen Evans, “Alice Adams: An Intimate Portrait, with Cats,” San Francisco Examiner Image, May 3, 1987, 19.
12 Mickey Friedman, “Alice Adams: Rewriting life into fiction,” San Francisco Examiner, February 5, 1979, 22.
13 Boucher, “Alice Adams,” San Francisco, October 1978, 132.
14 AA to Ann Cornelisen, May 26, 1981, Vassar College Special Collections.
15 Upton, “Changing the Past.”
16 Wayne Warga “Alice Adams,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 16, 1980; Boucher, “Alice Adams,” 131.
17 AA to DJ and John Murray, January 29, 1980; AA to HMS, February 21, 1980.
18 Alice Adams, MEX, 27–30; correspondence, AA and Doris Dörrie, HRC; Millicent Dillon, “Writer Alice Adams cuts to the core in her fiction and in her reading,” Stanford Campus Report, June 9, 1982, 9.
19 VW to AA [spring 1979]; Alice Walker’s comment: AA, interview with Marilyn Scharine.
20 Ann Cornelisen to Cyrilly Abels, September 13, 1974, Vassar College Special Collections.
21 Alaska: AA to Doris Dörrie, July 10, 1981; AA to Dollie Summerlin, 1981.
22 AA to Frances Kiernan [1982], NYPL.
23 Daniel Stern, “Take Back Your Mainstream,” New York Times Book Review, January 19, 1986.
24 Joyce Carol Oates, ed., Joyce Carol Oates: The Oxford Book of American Short Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 571.
25 “Introduction,” Prize Stories 1982: The O. Henry Awards, William Abrahams, ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982), x–xi.
CHAPTER 24: A FATEFUL AGE
Interviews: Michelle Blake, Richard Carr, John L’Heureux, Alison Lurie, Dennis McFarland, Carolyn See.
1 I. Magnin ad in San Francisco Chronicle, November 5, 1981, 11.
2 AA to RP, October 27, 1981.
3 AA, MEX, 23–27, 91–93.
4 Reviews of TSYA: Norbert Blei, Chicago Sun-Times, June 13, 1982; Paul Gray, “Balances,” Time, April 19, 1982; Judi Goldenberg, “Two Collections Reveal Feminist-Tinged Writing,” Richmond News Leader, June 2, 1982; Diane Ketchum, Oakland Tribune, August 15, 1982.
5 AA to Carolyn See, May 2, 1982; Carolyn See, “23 Stories Form Necklace of Thought,” Los Angeles Times, April 13, 1982.
6 Jacob Stockinger, “Dr. Jake’s Art & Book Takes: Alice Adams’ women are mainstream, marginal,” Madison Capital Times, June 4, 1982.
7 AA, “Colette Surpasses Even Her Own Heroines in Courage” (review of Letters from Colette), San Francisco Chronicle, November 23, 1980.
8 AA to RP, February 1, 1982; AA to HMS, February 6, 1982.
9 AA interview with Don Swaim, September 17, 1984.
10 Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood (1974; New York: New York Review Books Classic, 2015), 188.
11 AA to JCA, March 30, 1982.
12 AA to Jacqueline Rice, May 6, 1977; AA to VW, December 9, 1981; AA to Scott Crawford, December 19, 1981.
13 Dennis McFarland, memorial remarks for Alice Adams, New York, 1999, TS by Dennis McFarland.
14 Marjorie Leet Ford, “Writing a Writer,” unpublished essay.
15 Robert Allen Papinchak, a scholar who wrote about Sherwood Anderson, arranged the program. AA gave presentations at the college and in the city. In addition to airfare and a room at the Imnaha Hotel, she earned a $1,200 stipend.
16 AA to HMS, April 23, 1983.
17 N, April 1982.
18 Ibid., July 8, 1982.
19 AA to HMS, July 5, 1982, and August 26, 1982.
20 Carolyn See wrote to AA on November 17, 1982, that DeRoy’s daughter commented “off-handedly that her Dad’s car had been to hell and back about 20 times already.”
21 AA to RP, February 1, 1982.
22 Bryant Mangum’s Understanding Alice Adams (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019), 61–63, offers an excellent analysis of this story.
23 AA to Richard Carr, September 28, 1981.
24 Terry Trucco, “The First ‘Alice Adams Woman,’ ” International Herald Tribune, February 18, 1983, Weekend section, 7W.
25 Carolyn Kizer, “Alice Adams Explores the Women We Feared to Become,” San Jose Mercury News, September 16, 1984, 22–23.
26 N, July 28, 1983.
27 AA, “My First and Only House,” RR.
28 AA to HMS, July 5, 1982.
29 HMS to AA, May 22, 1987.
30 AA to HMS, July 9, 1983; HMS to AA, July 8, 1983.
31 AA to HMS, August 10, 1983; AA to JCA, September 9, [1983].
32 N, summer 1983.
33 AA to JCA, October 15, 1983.
34 Details of trip to Portugal from N; AA’s passport stamps; AA to Bryant Mangum, November 28, 1983; Vera Futscher Pereira, Retrovisor, 170–78. Adams’s story “Sintra” draws on this 1983 trip as well as on her return to Portugal in spring 1984.
35 N, “Lecture—50 Reasons,” November 16, 1983.
36 AA to JCA, October 15, 1983.
CHAPTER 25: SUPERIOR WOMEN
Interviews: JCA, Kay Bonetti, Ken Butigan, Richard Carr, Trent Duffy, Deirdre English, Gary Giddins, PAL, Bryant Mangum, Vera Futscher Pereira.
1 AA to HMS, June 28, 1984.
2 AA to Bryant Mangum, July 5, 1984.
3 N, May 24, 1984.
4 AA to HMS, June 28, 1984.
5 AA, “The Wild Coasts of Portugal,” Geo 6, no. 11 (August 1984): 56–65+.
6 Vera Futscher Pereira, Retrovisor, 180; newspaper clipping in N, July 24, 1984; JAC to AA, August 1984. N, August 31, 1980, says, “V. dead.”
7 AA to JCA, November 16, 1984.
8 Vera Futscher Pereira sent these papers to me in 2011; they will join the letters from Pereira to AA at HRC. The two poems by AA that he saved are: Letter from San Francisco
A cool grey city breathes the salt
Of summer fog; hills rise above
The spreading, sullen sea:
It is expected weather.
But one day breaks the list of days:
A wild bright day, splendid, sun-split.
Grey is white! The whole sea blinds
With blue. Our senses snatch
At air—at eucalyptus lemon scents,
Mediterranean. Unreal.
We think of unvisited Greek islands,
And Portuguese beaches.
This day should not have come—as grief
Comes back, that should be dead. Recalled,
You pierce my cool grey days with light.
Loss
Entered with wind, and mist,
&n
bsp; Foghorns that mourn invade this blue,
This haunted room,
All night.
Your dark face haunts the dark
Behind my eyes. A tentative [attempt] at love
Subsides—to tears against the blind
Blond shoulder of a stranger.
My whole house screams with loss.
9 AA to Richard Carr, October 23, 1984.
10 N, August 31, 1984.
11 “about being lonely…”: AA to Lavina Calvin, “Friday morning” [spring, 1984]; death of Lavina, AA to Bryant Mangum, August 16, 1984; “It seemed (to me) a willed death”: MEX, 39.
12 AA to JCA, October 29, 1984.
13 “A Woman’s ‘Naked and the Dead,’ ” Ms., September 1984, 28.
14 “Life After Radcliff” [sic], New York Times Book Review, September 23, 1984, 9.
15 Carolyn Kizer, “The Women We Feared to Become: Alice Adams,” Picking and Choosing: Essays on Prose (Cheney: Eastern Washington University Press, 1995), 15.
16 John Updike, “No More Mr. Knightleys,” Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 345–50.
17 John Updike, Self-Consciousness (New York: Knopf, 1989), 143–45.
18 Roberta Smoodin, “Rewards of Alice Adams,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, September 28, 1980, F5.
19 AA “Protest Correspondence” folder, HRC; writings and papers of Ken Butigan, Pledge of Resistance collection, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California.
20 William Cooney, “Jessica Mitford’s Very Civil Disobedience,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 31, 1985, 10.
21 Marie Pastrick to AA, July 20, 1985, HRC.
22 N, 1985, HRC.
23 Ibid., June 17, 1985, and June 6, 1986.
24 AA to Alison Lurie, n.d.
25 N, January 16, 1986.
CHAPTER 26: FAME AND FORTUNE
Interviews: PA, Trent Duffy, Deirdre English, Sydney Goldstein, Patricia Holt, Gerald Howard, PAL, Beverly Lowry, Daphne Merkin, Lincoln Pain, Louis Pain, Owen Renik.
1 N, January 30–31, 1986.
2 N, January 31, 1986.
3 Karen Evans, “Alice Adams: An Intimate Portrait, with Cats,” San Francisco Examiner Image, May 3, 1987, 25.
4 Harold Gilliam and Phil Palmer, The Face of San Francisco (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 79; Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny, An Architectural Guidebook to San Francisco and the Bay Area (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2007), 63; Robert Olmstead and T. H. Watkins, San Francisco’s Architectural Heritage (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1968).
5 AA, “America’s Room, and Mine,” [1991]. The essay was written for House & Garden but I have not been able to locate the issue in which it appeared.
6 Daphne Merkin, “A Neurotic’s Neurotic,” New York Times Magazine, December 30, 2007.
7 Owen Renik, eulogy for Allen Wheelis, 2007.
8 N, January 8, 1986.
9 Ibid., February 26, 1994.
10 Ibid., May 26, 1987.
11 Ibid., March 31, 1986.
12 Ibid., April 10 and 15, 1987.
13 AA to LJ, May 25, 1974.
14 AA to Diane Johnson, December 18, 1979.
15 Richard Rodriguez, “Sodom: Reflections on a Stereotype,” San Francisco Examiner Image, June 10, 1990, 10–16.
16 AA to Frances Kiernan, December 1, 1978.
17 Rodriguez, “Sodom: Reflections on a Stereotype.”
18 Patricia Holt, “Adams’ Return,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 8, 1985.
19 Beverly Lowry, “Women Who Do Know Better,” New York Times Book Review, September 1, 1985.
20 AA to Lowry and Bausch, November 21, 1985; AA to Margery Finn Brown, November 5, 1985.
21 AA to Margery Finn Brown, November 5, 1985.
22 Joyce Carol Oates to AA, February 4, 1983.
23 N, February 25, 1986.
24 Email from Peter Volpe to PAL, April 6, 2011.
25 Gish Jen, “Gender and the Business of Fiction,” Radcliffe Institute, www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSfskTbU6TI, 9:30 minutes; Eugenia Williamson, “Cover Girls: How lipstick, bathing suits, and naked backs discredit women’s fiction,” Boston Globe, June 28, 2014.
26 John Russell, “Alex Katz and the Art that Conceals Its Art,” New York Times, March 14, 1986.
27 Calvin Tomkins, “Painterly Virtues: Alex Katz’s life in art,” New Yorker, August 27, 2018, 58.
28 N, October 25, 1986.
29 AA, interview with Kay Bonetti, American Audio Prose Library.
CHAPTER 27: THINGS FALL APART
Interviews: JCA, PA, Elaine Badgley Arnoux, Carol Field, John Field, Frances Gendlin, Lucy Gray, Diane Johnson, Robert Flynn Johnson, Frances Kiernan, Anne Lamott, PAL, Beverly Lowry, Morissa McNie, Robert McNie Jr., John Murray, Jay Schaefer, Deborah Sparks, Peter Stansky, Mark Strand, Mary Ross Taylor, David Thomson, Tom Wilson Jr., Betsy Wing.
1 AA quoted by Mervyn Rothstein in “On Death and the Job of Arriving There,” New York Times, May 19, 1988, B3.
2 N, January 16, 1987.
3 Ben Yagoda, About Town (New York: Scribner, 2000), 412–16.
4 N, January 10, 1987.
5 UCSF medical records, obtained with permission of the McNie family.
6 AA to Beverly Lowry, March 16, 1987.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 N, March 24–25, 1987.
10 Contract, Knopf, HRC, and Robert McNie to Herb Caen, April 8, 1987.
11 AA to Beverly Lowry, March 16, 1987; N, March 23–28, 1987.
12 Mark Strand to AA, 1988.
13 Maine: AA to HMS, May 27, 1987.
14 Bob’s depression: AA to HMS, May 27, 1987; AA to JCA, May 29, 1987; UCSF medical record.
15 AA, commencement address, UC Berkeley English Department, 1987.
16 N, June 22, 1987.
17 Essay: AA, MEX, 209–14.
18 AA, N, passim.
19 Notebooks: N, July 18, 1987–September 1, 1987.
20 AA to Morissa McNie, October 7, 1987 (collection of Serena Burman).
21 UCSF admissions report, November 3, 1987; Morissa McNie correspondence and notes, collection of Serena Berman.
22 Morissa McNie to Deborah Sparks [December 1987], collection of D. Sparks.
23 PAL to D. Sparks (quoting Morissa McNie), October 10, 1987, collection D. Sparks.
24 UCSF medical records; notes taken by Morissa McNie, collection Serena Berman.
25 N, November 17, 1987.
26 Ibid., November 19, 1989.
27 Ibid., November 15, 1987.
28 AA to Bryant Mangum, March 15, 1988.
29 N, January 21, 1988.
30 Ibid., December 18, 1987, and January 7, 12–13, and 15–24, 1988; Dr. David Rabin to AA, “Saturday,” 1988.
31 Ibid., February 5, 1988.
32 On the jury for the National Book Award were Gloria Naylor, Hilma Wolitzer, and Richard Eder. Those three jurors agreed that their deliberations would remain private, according to Wolitzer in email to CS, March 17, 2018.
33 Julian Moynahan to AA, November 10, 1987, HRC; Julian Moynahan to Pulitzer Prize Board, December 26, 1987, Pulitzer Prizes Collections, Columbia University Libraries; “Black Writers in Praise of Toni Morrison,” New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1988. Richard Eder served on both the 1987 National Book Award jury and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction jury.
34 Elaine Kendall, “Stories Explore the Variety of Response,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1989.
35 Penelope Rowlands, “Our Own Colette,” San Francisco Focus, March 1991, 24.
36 David Deitz and Robert Popp, “Boas Pleads Guilty in Teen Sex Case—Jail Unlikely Under Plan by Lawyers,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 21, 1988. Boas was one of fourteen customers, including businessmen and police officers, indicted for patronizing “the decade-old brothel operation.”
37 Examiner Staff, “Mugger Slashes Arm of Examiner Columnist,” San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, August 20, 1989; Stephanie Salter, “Alice Adams: Fierce, sexy, generou
s,” San Francisco Examiner, July 1, 1999.
38 AA to JCA, November 12, 1989.
39 AA to HMS, January 25, 1989.
40 Caroline Drewes, “The Next Chapter: Alice Adams embarks on new travels, new projects and a life lived alone,” San Francisco Examiner, October 25, 1989, B1–B5.
41 N, October 19, 1989.
CHAPTER 28: BOOK OF BOB
Interviews: PA, Elaine Badgley Arnoux, Stephen Brown, Millicent Dillon, Trent Duffy, Willard Fee, Mary Gaitskill, Lucy Gray, DJ, Robert Flynn Johnson, Frances Kiernan, PAL, Marcus Livingston, Beverly Lowry, Alison Lurie, Scott Massey, Morissa McNie, Robert McNie Jr., John Murray, Judith Rascoe, Richard Rodriguez, Penelope Rowlands, Carolyn See, Deborah Sparks, Mary Ross Taylor, David Thomson, Amanda Urban, Hilma Wolitzer.
1 Christopher Lehman-Haupt, “The Rising and Falling in One Family,” The New York Times, March 21, 1991; Rowlands, “Our Own Colette,” 24.
2 Lynne Sharon Schwartz to VW, April 2, 1991, Knopf papers, HRC.
3 Carolyn See, “Spoiled in Paradise,” Washington Post Book World, March 10, 1991.
4 Carol Fowler, “New Novel Attacks Values of 1980s,” West County Times, May 7, 1991.
5 Patricia Holt, “Literary Evenings for AIDS Research,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 26, 1990.
6 N, August 12, 1989.
7 Sigmar Warner Wilson to AA, September 11, 1989.
8 AA, ed., The Best American Short Stories of 1991 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991).
9 Correspondence between AA and Redbook, HRC.
10 N, August 13, 1991, states that she is writing a piece on gray hair for Allure for $5,000.
11 Marjorie Leet Ford, unpublished essay.
12 William Neuman, “Surprises South of the Border,” San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, October 27, 1991, 3; Carolyn See to AA, October 22, 1991.
13 AA to Alison Lurie, September 8, 1990.
14 Seattle: N, March 24, 1991.
15 Sidney Hedelman, Collected Works (Benfleet [email protected], 2011), ii.
16 N, February 20, 1990.
17 Ibid., February 18–24, 1990.
18 Ibid., February 5–9, 1990.
19 Ronald B. Elkin, MD, to Bill Fee, MD, October 15, 1992, Stanford medical records.
20 N, September 19, 1990.
21 Penelope Rowlands, “The Adams Family,” W, April 29–May 6, 1991, 32.
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