ALICE ADAMS

A thorough and often surprising life of the celebrated author of short stories and novels.

Sklenicka, whose earlier biography (Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 2009) earned high praise, returns with an intimate, detailed life of Adams (1926-1999), who did not begin publishing regularly until the mid-1960s. But when she did, she received recognition quickly. By the time she died of heart failure, she had established herself as a gifted, perceptive, and popular writer, publishing stories often in the New Yorker and books with Knopf. As Sklenicka relates, she enjoyed some hefty paydays. The author focuses mostly on a couple areas of Adams’ life: her writing and her active love life. Frequently, Sklenicka points out how deeply Adams drew from her own life to inspire her fiction; she wrote about settings and people that she knew. As Sklenicka reports, frequently, Adams was an attractive woman who displayed a great sense of sexual freedom. One brief marriage was followed by a lengthy cohabitation with another man (it didn’t end well), and once she became financially secure, she enjoyed travel, fine food, and a nice house in San Francisco. Sklenicka also charts Adams’ acceptance of the women’s liberation movement and writes perceptively about her relationship with her gay son. The author doesn’t provide much information about Adams’ work routines, but there is a deep undercurrent of admiration that sometimes bubbles to the surface. “Alice Adams lived for love and for stories,” writes Sklenicka. “Her courage and vulnerability, tenderness and tenacity allowed her to break the strictures of her upbringing and transform her intense emotional sensibility into enduring short stories and novels that illuminate women’s lives in the twentieth century.” Near the end, Sklenicka herself appears in a startling tale about Adams’ ashes.

Pervasive, deep research informs this inspiring story of a writer who demonstrably earned such a sturdy, illuminating biography.