WHEN ALL THE MEN WORE HATS

The daughter of the acclaimed fiction writer revisits her father’s life and work many years after his death.

Forty years after Home Before Dark (1984), her compassionate memoir of her father, John Cheever, Susan Cheever—herself an accomplished author—returns with deeper perspective on their relationship. Her earlier book first disclosed that her father lived a double life—suburban family man with secret gay encounters—revealed through journals she read after his 1982 death that were later published in abridged form in 1991. In graceful prose, her latest work probes deeper, examining their relationship and his internal landscape through his short stories, over 200 published mostly in the New Yorker from the late 1930s onward. By turns affectionate and admiring but also clear-sighted and unsparing, she focuses primarily on six of his most memorable stories, including “The Five-Forty-Eight” (1954), “Reunion” (1962), and “The Swimmer” (1964), all included in the appendix. She reveals how their daily family lives often anchored his fiction, with family members serving as character inspiration. “The little girls in his stories were not me, he insisted—although they looked like me and thought like me and did what I did,” writes Cheever. “The confusion between life and art created a painful tension for him as well as for us, his subjects and family, who were first exploited and then caught up in a process that—he often reminded us—was greater and more noble than our hurt feelings.” Regarding his hidden sexuality, she also brings modern insight to a subject that was considered so taboo at that time. “Did living a lie help him create the lie that is the truth of fiction? The best lies, as he well knew, are the ones that sail closest to the truth. The best fiction is fiction that seems to be real.”

An eloquent and fully immersive portrait of a renowned author.