Susan Cheever: Revisiting the Stories of John Cheever
Susan Cheever and Molly Jong-Fast reexamine John Cheever's literary legacy — the suburban darkness, the brilliant prose, and the complicated private life.
Why we picked this
No one can speak to Cheever's work and life with more authority — or more complexity — than his daughter. This is a literary conversation with genuine stakes.
John Cheever mapped postwar American anxiety onto the lawns and cocktail hours of Westchester with a precision that still cuts. His stories remain among the finest in the American canon — and his life, as his daughter Susan has written with unflinching honesty, was as turbulent as any of his fiction.
Susan Cheever’s biography of her father and her own memoir Home Before Dark gave readers an interior view of a writer whose public image barely hinted at the private complexity. In conversation with writer Molly Jong-Fast, she brings that same candor to the question of how we read an artist whose work and biography are inseparable.
For readers who love the stories — and for those who’ve wondered what it means to inherit a legend — this is a rare evening with someone who actually lived inside it.