Other Writer's Daughters

     In 1984, when Susan Cheever published her memoir, Home Before Dark, about her father, the novelist and short story writer John Cheever, I was quite simply green: jealous, envious, covetous and naive. John Cheever was the quintessential New Yorker writer. Susan, already a published novelist, hit the memoir ball out of the park with this one, and it is still in print. She was married then, to Robert Cowley, the son of Malcolm Cowley, one of my father's and my favorite resident writers in Sherman, CT.

     The not so pretty part of this story was John Cheever's alcoholism and depression. Later Susan Cheever herself battled alcoholism and what she describes as an addiction to sex. All three of her marriages ended in divorce. Through it all, while raising two children, Susan Cheever kept on writing: 10 books published, when last I counted. I find it astonishing that knowing what she did about the writer's life, she decided to pursue it.
     If she's anything like me, she did it because she wanted her father's approval. She wrote that he expressed his disapproval of her, admonishing her to loose weight, dreaming that she would marry a fabulously wealthy man. In my father's letters to his mistress, he observed that I seemed to able to attract boys, even though I had, in his words, absolutely no sex appeal. Both fathers viewed their daughters thru the lense of men's primal attraction to beautiful women. Not much support for a career in that blindered evaluation. Susan Cheever makes an observation about Home Before Dark, ''having written it I know my father better than I ever did while he was alive.'' I've certainly felt the same in writing about Croswell Bowen. One of the reasons I envied Susan Cheever was that she got about 15 more years with her father than I did with mine. Of course, it's possible she kept marrying those writers as the closest she could get to her father's complete approval. When my father died, I divorced my writer husband; I don't think you can earn the approval of the dead.