“I’m sorry I’m going to have to put your name on the waiting list.”
“Whaaaaa?!”

It was 10 minutes before Calvin Trillin’s reading and the Chelsea bookstore was packed. With alot of women. College-aged women in turtle necks and black framed glasses. Middle aged women with black rimmed glasses. Older women with frizzy gray hair, geometric earrings, and black rimmed glasses. I gasped at my own reflection in the window. I was wearing a knit sweater and…black framed glasses.

I wanted to pummel them. I travelled from the East Side so I could hear about Trillin’s muse. The bookstore bouncer finally let me in and I ended up standing next to Mr. Trillin. He was short. I mean, we were almost eye level. He was wearing a khaki trench coat and hat, looking more like a private investigator than a writer for The New Yorker. When he took his hat off, his head resembled a kiwi with the top half peeled off. I was surprised to see he had such sparking, sapphire blue eyes. (There she goes with blue eyes again.)

With his unmodulated, Midwestern voice, he read some of his older New Yorker pieces and then an excerpt from his book About Alice, a memoir about his late wife. Trillin has often said in interviews that Alice was his muse and he was constantly trying to impress her, particularly in his writing. About Alice is heartfelt but I first fell in love with Trillin while reading the first line to his book The Tummy Trilogy: “The best restaurants in the world, are, of course, in Kansas City.”

During the Q&A session I asked, “What was your writing process like for this book?”

“It was hard. Not because of the subject matter but it was just emotionally draining. But what I really got stuck on was the structure.”

I hear it time and time again. It doesn’t matter if you are a freshman in college or a seasoned writer like Trillin, you will constantly struggle with structure. I’ve also heard alot of writers talk about their “ideal reader”, the person they are writing to behind the computer screen. Stephen King says that his ideal reader is his wife. We all have our muses. Everything we write is essentially for them, to them. I think Trillin’s muse ultimately helped him determine the structure. He said that he began each chapter with a perception of Alice that everyone had and then used that as a platform to describe how she was in fact not like that at all.