Ms. Waters lives alone now. She has never liked being alone, even as a child. Her last romantic relationship ended a couple of years ago. She is always looking for a new one because she is, above all else, a romantic. But she has some specific ideas about it.

“Younger men are my Achilles’ heel,” she said.

Her friends, like the former restaurant critic and Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl, worry that she won’t find someone who can go the distance with her.

“With Alice, you have to march to her tune,” Ms. Reichl said. “Anybody who is strong enough to take her on isn’t going to do what she wants to do.”

Ms. Waters is heartened that her only child, Fanny Singer, 34, is preparing to move back to the Bay Area from England. Ms. Singer, whose parents divorced more than 20 years ago, said she left “to form an identity outside of my mom’s magnetic orbit.” But the move was not a reflection on her deep affection for her mother.

“My mom is a hummingbird burrowing into flowers,” she said. “She’s so captivating you can’t help but be rapt.”

Ms. Waters’s plan has always been to spend her later years in a multigenerational commune of her own design. “I’d better get busy on that,” she said.

With a laugh, she said she wanted to be buried in a bodysuit threaded with mushroom spores that turn the body into compost. One suspects she is only partly kidding.

And then?

There will be no afterlife, she said. “I’m an ashes-to-ashes kind of person.”

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