Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter

This is a very well written memoir. I haven't read much of her father's work, but of course I knew of him before reading it. I liked that she showed his character with affection yet clarity. Susan Cheever's obvious love for her father comes through, and certainly her view of him isn't as objective as a disinterested party would be, but his humanity and endearing qualities shine through, along with his weakness and frailties. I enjoyed the way she interwove aspects of her life and his, and the construction of the book. I regretted seeing it end and wanted to know more about everyone. There is some obliqueness as another reviewer mentioned, this is definitely not a 'tell all' with a lot of dish. I found Cheever to be insightful, open and yet delicate toward the more unflattering and painful aspects of their life. A good read.

This memoir tells a great deal about the extended family of John Cheever. His is the less reputable wing of of a family which goes back to the early foundations of America. Susan Cheever writes with understanding and consideration of her father's troubled life. The shocking bankruptcy and abandonment of his father remained a basis for his great insecurity throughout his life. Susan Cheever reveals her father to be a man of great charm, and excellent ability to befriend and be helped by wealthy patrons, including those at Yaddo the Saratoga writing colony which for him was a second home. Susan Cheever also describes somewhat fitfully the mixed- up - marriage Cheever never let go of, one in which there seemed to have been infidelity on both sides- and which seemed to go downhill in the later years. Susan Cheever writes with descriptive elegance about her father 's life. She does not however explain or even hint at the great mystery of how he managed to create his best work. And she does not really tell us what the work consists in, or how it best expressed what her father was. I also felt the work lacking in another way. It does not really get inside Cheever and reveal to us the world the way he might have seen it. Nor does it trace the effect of his celebrity and alcoholism , of his wit and capacity for friendship on his children. Susan Cheever is silent about her father's effect upon her. I found that is with all the basic admiration and sympathy that she expresses for her father, a certain coldness in the work- a coldness which was perhaps her father's also. But again perhaps I found Cheever's story much less 'moving 'than I might have because I too am not a great fan of his stories.

This is a very interesting look at the demons of the father, from alcoholism to a confused sexuality that wreaked havoc on his family. John Cheever forged a career writing about his own issues, tales of disillusion and disintegration in suburbia, all to alcoholic excess and in search of meaning. Susan, his daughter, is an absolutely excellent writer and explains what he was like as she grew up, so it is not a straight biography but mixed with memoire. Some of it is shocking, such as the way John periodically left to be with men, only to come back to a wife he clearly loved enduringly. But there is also a lot of redemption, of striving to be better though the pain is ever present. Oddly, I have never liked his writing much, finding his personal problems more of a spectacle and indeed more absorbing to learn about. Susan, I think, is the true writing talent in the family - her style is clear and unflinchingly honest, almost exhibitionistic. Few expose themselves so evenhandedly. Indeed, her moments are unforgettably vivid: such as her sitting in the lap of a drunken guest writer, in a tweed jacket reeking of cigarette smoke, saying to herself that she would marry that kind of man; or watching her father, after a few hours of writing and overcoming a hangover, pruning his lawn with ritual energy. Truly a beautiful, often tormented, book. Warmly recommended.

From The Back Cover: "When I was young, and my father could see that something was bothering me, he used to suggest that I might try saying a prayer. A prayer for strength, or a prayer for courage. Later, when I began making a living as a journalist, he often suggested that if something disturbed me, I might try writing about it. Keeping a journal helped him a great deal, he said. Putting experience down on paper made it seem less chaotic, less depressing, more sympathetic. "I write to make sense of my life," he used to say. "So in the autumn of 1981, when we found out that my father was going to die soon, it seemed natural that I should write about this. I did, and it helped. I wrote about my feelings, and I wrote about the progress of his illness, and I wrote about cancer in general, and I described trips to hospitals and interviews with doctors, and casual late-night conversations with doctors when they relaxed and confided the truth, and encouraging moments and sad times, and things my father said that seemed important. As the months passed, I found myself writing less and less about the present and more about the past. Everything that happened seemed to release a flood of memories of our life together, and of our life as a family, and of the hundreds of stories he had told me about himself and his past and his life as a writer...and that was how I began to write this book." --Susan Cheever From The Inside Flap: "I have been a storyteller since the beginning of my life, rearranging facts in order to make them more interesting and sometimes more significant", John Cheever wrote in his private journal in 1961. "I have turned my eccentric old mother into a woman of wealth and position and made my father a captain at sea. I have improvised a background for myself--genteel, traditional--and it is generally accepted." In Home Before Dark, John Cheever's daughter, Susan Cheever, has used his revealing unpublished journals, letters and her own memories of their life together in a talented and volatile family to tell the remarkable story of one of American literature's foremost writers. Home Before Dark is a moving chronicle of John Cheever's successes and failures as a son, brother, husband, and father; his childhood in a prosperous family on Boston's South Shore and his flight from the family when that prosperity came to an abrupt end; his search for salaried work in New York City in the 1930's when his writing career often seemed permanently stalled; his stint in the army during World War II; his struggle to write a novel and find a publisher for it in the 1950's, a time when he was gaining a reputation as a master of the short story; his unhappy break with The New Yorker magazine; his financial success in the 1960's and the subsequent collapse that appeared to be the end of his career; his efforts to hold his marriage and family together under the strains of his own secret life; how he finally won his twenty-year battle with alcoholism and sa

Home Before Dark is a beautifully written, moving book that stays with you long after you have finished reading it. It helps that Susan Cheever's subject, her father, was (and remains long after his death) one of the finest fiction writers in the history of American literature. What distinguishes John Cheever's stories, outside of his magical touch with words, is the passion and love he brings to illuminating his small corner of the world -- life in the New York suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s. Most writers who explore the suburbs do so with an arm's length superiority -- taking pains to distance themselves politically, emotionally, and intellectually from their characters. What makes Cheever's stories such a joy it that he loves the world he writes about -- even as he recognizes its banalities and limitations. In Cheever's hand, the commuter life becomes a sad, beautiful symphony of lost hopes and desires. The 5:45 train, the clinking of cocktail glasses, the smell of meat cooking on an outdoor grill are not just dull routines of modern life, but thrilling and exotic elements of that peculiarly American optimism and quest for success that flowered after World War II -- all the more alluring because the quest is so often doomed. In the same way, Susan Cheever brings passion and honesty to the telling of her father's life. In her hands, John Cheever's own outwardly unremarkable search for the suburban dream life of wife, kids, dog and station wagon in Ossining, New York becomes a dark romantic quest of longing, passion, success and disappointment. She is thoroughly honest (sometimes brutally so) in detailing Cheever's alcoholism, philandering, phobias and parental shortcomings -- so it is all the more remarkable that the final portrait of Cheever that emerges is so rich and full of love. This book is the perfect companion piece for Cheever's indispensible Collected Stories (with that famous red cover). Think of Home Before Dark as a sort of lexicon to John Cheever's world. I keep both books on a special bookshelf -- easily accessible -- containing the books I come back to again and again, like old friends.