Quote from Susan Cheever

[queerbychoice]

Susan just read this out loud to me, and we are both delighted by it:

As a parent, [John Cheever] could be loving and companionable but was also sharply sarcastic and, in what he confided to his children, merciless. With the two oldest, Susan and Benjamin, he made no secret of his disappointments. Susan, who resembled him in her compulsions, wild streak, and intelligence, was overweight in spite of both parents' relentless nagging; she told Bailey, "In many ways I was a tremendous disappointment to them, I'm proud to say, and hope I've continued to be, since what they wanted me to be is pretty empty."
          —John Updike, "Basically Decent: A big biography of John Cheever" (review of Blake Bailey's John Cheever: A Life), The New Yorker, March 9, 2009

Comments

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

I went to college with Benjamin Cheever's son, and I was always hoping that he'd spill family stuff like this. :)

[hansel25.livejournal.com]

Susan Cheever should write a book. She sounds so original! I love her already!

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

The next sentence is about Benjamin: "Ben, when he came to read his father's confessional journals, was dismayed by how little he and his siblings figured in them; he underwent, during his first marriage, a period of estrangement."

Grandchildren and grandparents often don't know each other very well, I think; they may have the impression they do, but in reality they've just sat in the same room together on holidays without actually telling each other much or listening much to what they do tell. And in this case, even the children and the parents seem to have had a lot of illusions about each other.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

She has written books. The review says that all of John Cheever's children except the youngest, Federico, became writers.

[hansel25.livejournal.com]

Yikes, I sound so ignorant but I can't say I've heard of her books. Can I delete my previous comment?

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

If you want to, you can. But I hadn't heard of her books either until now. I'll be surprised if anyone reading this today has.