Alice Adams

October 1, 2019
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.

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October 7, 2019
Biographer Sklenicka (Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life) succeeds in creating an intriguing portrait of a midcentury fiction writer arguably better known for her acquaintances and times than for her writing. Born into relative privilege in 1926 as the daughter of academics, Adams’s parents sent her to boarding school and Radcliffe during the Depression and WWII. Later, the strikingly attractive Adams revolved in Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow’s orbit. Yet, while Sklenicka’s research indicates that she may have slept with both, hers is not a story of sex to success: those most instrumental in her career were women, such as editor Victoria Wilson, who molded Adams’s second novel, 1975’s Families and Survivors, into a hit. The times didn’t hurt either: after a long apprenticeship, hampered by supporting her husband’s own writing career before their 1958 divorce, Adams found an audience in the 1970s that was newly avid for her core concern: female-centric depictions of love and sex. Her career peaked in 1984, when rights to Superior Women sold for $635,000, 15 years before her death from heart problems. A summation of Adams’s place in 20th-century literature would have greatly helped, but Sklenicka’s well-researched biography nevertheless easily evokes the spirit of Adams’s life, times, and works. Agent: Sandra Dijkstra, Sandra Dijkstra Literary.

December 15, 2019
Sklenicka (Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, 2009) quotes Alice Adams as saying she "remembered everything that ever happened to her," and as Sklenicka carefully explicates, much of "everything that ever happened" ended up in Adams' award-winning fiction. Those who love the novels and short stories, which trace women's lives beginning in 1930s America as they celebrate, grieve, and grow with the century, will be startled and delighted to see where the life and the fiction converge. Indeed, Sklenicka cautions that on occasion, she mines the fiction to fill in factual or emotional gaps in the life, and the biography often reads like an Adams novel blessedly slowed down to allow the reader to soak for a moment in the atmospheres of a Chapel Hill childhood, Radcliffe College, Paris, and 1960s San Francisco. Sklenicka undergirds her examination of Adams with dives into the work of Simone de Beauvoir and psychoanalysis, delineating the ways in which Adams' fiction offers personal narratives of second-wave feminism while also telling the story of this daring and unconventional woman and gifted writer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)