Alice Trillin, 63; Writer, Educator

Alice Trillin, a writer, educator and television producer who was known to many fans of her humorist husband, Calvin, as a character in his books, died Tuesday in New York. She was 63.

Her death was caused by a weakened heart, damaged during radiation treatments for the lung cancer she battled in 1976.

After recovering from the disease, she became a producer of children’s educational television and author of articles and a book about being a cancer patient.

She appeared frequently as a voice of reason in her husband’s writings about food, particularly the books “American Fried,” “Third Helpings” and “Alice, Let’s Eat: Further Adventures of a Happy Eater,” which was a 1980 nominee for a National Book Award. She was also a presence in two of his other books, “Travels With Alice” and “Family Man.”

Some of her husband’s descriptions of her verged on the fictional. “With her ‘weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day,’ Alice, as portrayed by her husband, is a no-nonsense woman of the type who would favor sensible shoes and severe clothes,” the Wall Street Journal observed in a 1979 story. “The real-life Alice, however, is an attractive and delicate blond rather than the grim and forbidding matron she appears to be in her husband’s pieces.”

In a humorous retort to her husband published in the Nation, she complained that the reason he so often assigned her the role of heavy in his book was because she “likes to say fettuccine with white truffles and cream occasionally--a dish considered by some to represent the elitist Eastern establishment.”

Born in Portchester, N.Y., Alice Trillin attended Wellesley College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1960, and Yale University, where she obtained a master’s in English in 1961. She taught English at Hofstra University and the City University of New York.

She met her husband-to-be at a party given by Victor S. Navasky, editor of the Nation. She and Calvin were married in 1965. She spent the next several years teaching and developing courses about writing, which eventually led to consulting work for New York’s WNET/Thirteen.

In 1981 she founded a television production company, Learning Designs. It produced the PBS series “Behind the Scenes” to teach children about creative thinking and how artists work.

Five years earlier, she was diagnosed with lung cancer, had a left lobe removed and underwent radiation and chemotherapy. A nonsmoker who suspected that her cancer was the result of childhood exposure to her parents’ secondhand smoke, she emerged as an advocate of a smokeless society.

She also became known for her writing about being a cancer patient.

She penned an article about the relationship between cancer patients and their doctors, “Of Dragons and Garden Peas: A Cancer Patient Talks to Doctors,” which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1981. It is still used in medical schools.

Last January, the New Yorker published a provocative piece she wrote called “Betting Your Life,” in which she discussed the grueling decision-making process she faced in 1990 when tests suggested that her cancer had metastasized and spread to her spine. After a series of confounding consultations, she finally decided to trust a doctor who told her that the shadows on her X-rays were not tumors but radiation damage to her bones. That doctor turned out to be right.

She also wrote “Dear Bruno,” a book that had begun as a letter to the 12-year-old son of friends who was facing cancer in 1979. She had no thought of publishing it until much later, after she and her husband, whom she called Bud, became volunteer counselors at Paul Newman’s Hole-in-the-Wall Camp for children with cancer. She read the letter to children there and found that they loved it.

Laced with her characteristic humor and warmth, it began:

“Dear Bruno,

“Bud has already written and told you all our jokes (not quite--did you hear the one about the fog?--oh well, it’s probably too dense for you) . . . and he has sent you an arrow-through-the-head to wear when you tell your doctors you have a little headache, and so I thought there wasn’t much left for me to write you, but there is one thing I know about that Bud doesn’t know about, and that is what it’s like to have a tumor in your lung.”

Published in 1996 with illustrations by New Yorker cartoonist Edward Koren, the book was distributed free to young cancer patients around the country. Kirkus Reviews wrote that “Trillin is never patronizing; her blend of empathy, warmth and simplicity are perfectly directed at her 12-year-old correspondent.”

Trillin is survived by her husband and two daughters, Abigail of San Francisco and Sarah of Los Angeles.