When All the Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever
From the publisher:
A sympathetic and illuminating account of the stories of John Cheever, and the intersecting life and work of the legendary writer John Cheever, as told by his eldest daughter.
The Stories of John Cheever, published in 1978, brought together some of the finest short fiction ever written. The collection was honored with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and it would go on to sell millions of copies and to define the American short story and shape generations of writers. Cheever's chronicles of modern life both emerged from a distinctly American culture and also created it—inspiring everything from Mad Men to a Raymond Carver story, from rock songs to a Seinfeld episode. Growing up, Susan Cheever, John Cheever's eldest child and only daughter, read what he read, heard what he heard, bantered and gossiped with him and her brothers and mother at the dinner table, and later watched her father type on the cheap yellow paper he favored. A daughter much like Susan appears in many of Cheever's stories and a family much like theirs is at the center of his writing.
In When All the Men Wore Hats, Susan Cheever looks back on her father's work and seeks to understand the connections between art and life. How did a bit of local gossip, a slice of Greek myth, and a new translation of Madame Bovary somehow become a brilliant gem like "The Country Husband" or "The Swimmer"? In her 1984 book Home Before Dark, published two years after her father's death, Cheever wrote movingly about her father and the secrets he kept, but here, years later, she tells the story of the remarkable stories themselves, six of which appear in full in the book's appendix.
"By turns affectionate and admiring but also clear-sighted and unsparing . . . An eloquent and fully immersive portrait of a renowned author." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Simultaneously a tribute to her father and an exposé of his failings, Cheever's narrative offers bittersweet grace to a man whose life was a kind of fiction and whose fiction drew mercilessly from his life. It's equal parts wrenching and edifying." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Lively, provocative memoir. Susan Cheever . . . moves fluidly between jaunty literary analyses and charged memories of a father." —Margaret Quamme, Booklist
"Remarkable. . . sui generis. . . This illuminating book fills in many blanks about a troubled and troubling life." —Ellen Gilbert, Library Journal (starred review)
"As a writer and a daughter of a writer, [Susan Cheever] explor[es] the wellsprings of creativity . . . with openhearted elegance. Clear-eyed and compassionate . . . In her two books about her father, Susan weighs every ounce of the burden of stress he carried; she takes note of his literary alchemy and also of the emotional bruises inflicted on his wife and children." —Adam Begley, The Atlantic