Remembering the Alice Series

At the New Yorker, Rebecca Davis O’Brien looks back at Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Alice series, which Naylor started in 1985 and just completed, at age 80, with with Now I’ll Tell You Everything:

I was in elementary school in the nineteen-nineties when I discovered “The Agony of Alice,” a book that occupied the anxious years and sacred shelf space between Ramona Quimby and Jane Eyre. Alice was my companion; the rasp of her crisp new jeans — bought, with the help of a Gap saleswoman, after a mortifying encounter with a boy from school when Lester takes her into the men’s changing room — was as familiar to me as Harriet the Spy’s tomato-and-mayonnaise sandwiches. For years, I imagined that my first kiss would come, like Alice’s, on a porch swing, with the taste of melted Whitman’s chocolate-covered cherries. I aged faster than she did, but, like the best characters from our childhood, Alice remained a beacon, a perpetual reference.

I loved this series; anyone else?

[TNY]