What is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas about?

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is Gertrude Stein's most accessible book, and its central joke is that it isn't really an autobiography of Alice B. Toklas at all. Stein writes in the voice of her partner and companion, describing their life together in Paris from Alice's arrival in 1907 through the years when 27 rue de Fleurus became the gathering point for the most significant artists and writers of the early twentieth century. The conceit allows Stein to write about herself in third person while pretending to be writing about someone else, and she makes the most of the displacement.

The portrait that emerges — of Picasso visiting on Saturdays, of Matisse arguing about painting, of Hemingway arriving young and ambitious, of Sherwood Anderson giving letters of introduction, of Juan Gris and Apollinaire and Braque and Cézanne's canvases stacked against the walls — is one of the most vivid accounts of a cultural moment ever written. Stein positions herself at the center of all of it, a position that her contemporaries sometimes disputed but that the book's sheer conviction makes persuasive.

Alice as narrator is observant, dry, occasionally sharp, and devoted without being sycophantic. Stein gives her a voice that feels distinct from Stein's own experimental prose — chattier, more social, less interested in language for its own sake. Whether this represents an accurate rendering of Alice or a projection is impossible to know. The two women spent forty years together, and the relationship is both the book's subject and its engine.

The autobiography is not without its flaws. Stein is self-aggrandizing in ways she expects the reader to find charming, and her dismissals of other writers (particularly Hemingway, by the time the book was published) are cutting in ways that provoked public disagreement. But as a portrait of Paris modernism from inside the salon where so much of it was debated, the book has no rival.