The Non-Celebrity Tell-All latest book is about an ordinary woman from an ordinary family living an ordinary life. Someone, Cheever says, like herself
SUSAN CHEEVER, AN AVERAGE WOMAN TRYING TO JUGGLE TWO kids and a job, waits to be introduced by her friend Erica Jong. It’s a sweltering night at Books & Co. on the Upper East Side and the wobbly folding chairs are packed together like pews, but the seats are nevertheless filled with people waiting to hear Cheever read from her new book, A Woman’s Life: The Story of an Ordinary American and Her Extraordinary Generation. A confessional biography of a real woman whose father was not a famous bisexual alcoholic novelist, it is a departure for Cheever.
Jong praises Cheever for the “exquisite balance of love and honesty” of Home Before Dark, her book about her father, and of Treetops, her book about her mother. “When I first heard that Susan’s new book was to be a biography of an ordinary, anonymous everywoman,” Jong says, “I felt cold shivers go down my spine.”
Looking somewhat embarrassed by Jong’s moist praise, Cheever describes her subject, the pseudonymous Linda Green: a high school cheerleader turned hippie who dropped acid and lived on a commune in an open marriage with her first husband, and who today is a housewife with two kids on Boston’s South Shore. “This is a woman whose first date with the man she would marry was the night after President Kennedy’s assassination,” Cheever says, reveling in the cliched touchstones of Linda’s life, “then went to Woodstock right after her honeymoon.” Just as she is about to begin reading, Cheever pauses. “And for those of you who really came to hear about my famous family,” she adds, “I’ll leave time for questions about them later.”
AFTER FIVE SLIM, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVELS and two memoirs, Susan Cheever has put her own family aside-if within easy reach-to create what may be a new literary form: the non-celebrity tell-all. In A Woman’s Life, she has applied the tools of psycho-journalism to a subject who, from a strictly commercial point of view, wouldn’t seem to warrant it. But it was either that or The Dead Porno Brother.
Cheever recalls how, in early 1992, she had gone to San Francisco with her then-husband, journalist Warren Hinckle, to write a book about a famous pornographer on trial for murdering his brother/partner. During a recess, she called her agent, Andrew Wylie, to check on a novel she had delivered to Bantam, only to be told Bantam had decided not to publish it.
“So, what’s my next book?” Cheever asked Wylie.
Wylie suggested Cheever do a biography of a famous woman.
“But I don’t care about some wealthy paragon of virtue who didn’t share my struggle,” Cheever says she shouted into the phone. “I want to write about an average woman, my age, who is trying to juggle two kids, a job, and a husband!”
“I was at a crossroads,” Cheever recalls. “It was between a fratricidal pair of pornographers or an ordinary Boston housewife.” She pauses for effect. “And which did l choose?” She snorts, as if both amused and mildly exasperated by her own commercial miscalculation. “Well,” she adds, shrugging, “that’s the story of my life.”
Cheever’s life on this particular morning is a distracted juggle of the sort of genteel domestic chaos her father would have captured deftly in a short story. She is waiting in her East End Avenue apartment for Hinckle to return from the doctor with their son, who is being X-rayed to see if he has pneumonia, when the door opens and 12-year-old Sarah, her daughter by art critic Calvin Tomkins, walks in with four friends, all members of a local witches’ coven. Lydia the yappy dog and Smokey the fat gray rabbit sniff around the living room while Cheever returns a half-dozen calls regarding next week’s book tour. She worries about leaving the coven alone while she goes to lunch but decides they’ll be fine. “Please don’t destroy anything,” she shouts as she leaves, “or sacrifice Smokey.”
“I GUESS MY NICHE IN THE LITERARY WORLD IS DOING UN-BIOGRAPHY,” Cheever says, poking at a plate of chicken with peppers at a nearby Chinese restaurant, “off-center biographies that are as much about me as my subject.” Lately she’s been thinking about a subject who isn’t an immediate member of her family. “Someone really big, like Florence Nightingale, or Mozart, or maybe … God.” It’s not clear whether she expects laughter or stunned silence, until she continues, “Now, I don’t exactly have His cooperation, but I do know a lot of people who talk to Him, so I could do the Joe McGinniss thing and make up the dialogue ….It’d be the ultimate unauthorized biography.”
Cheever’s next subject won’t actually be God; it’ll be Cher. She’s cowriting the autobiography for her friend Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster. “I don’t have to do any research,” she explains. “Cher decides what’s going in, and I just write it up.” Still recovering from unearthing her father’s bisexuality while researching Home Before Dark, Cheever says she’d rather not know whatever it is Cher doesn’t want anyone to know. “Frankly, I don’t want to dig up any more secrets.”
The book Cheever wants to write is the final volume of the Cheever trilogy. “I’ve done my father’s and mother’s families,” she says, “which leaves my generation-my two brothers and all my cousins, although I know they won’t be happy about it.”
“I’m in favor of her writing the book as long as it is flattering to me,” jokes Cheever’s brother Ben. “Susan can write whatever she wants to write about. I was a little stinky when she wrote Home Before Dark, and I really regret that now.” Nevertheless, Ben Cheever adds, “I don’t have any great secrets she might reveal that would make the book interesting.”
That’s not the point, Susan Cheever says. “I write to bear witness, whether about my three failed marriages or my crazy family. If I have any usefulness on this planet, it is to tell the story of my life and ‘to tell the truth truly,’ as Emerson said.”
All this talk reminds Cheever, inevitably, of her father. “I was trying to figure out why he was so brilliantly seductive with journalists, and I realized because he had a dark secret he really didn’t want discovered, he was extremely sharp and focused,” she says. “My problem is I’m not hiding anything.”
Thus the seven volumes of confessional prose.
“Yeah, I guess,” she says glumly, but then quickly rebounds.
“But I think that family is the most interesting thing in the world. If I had my druthers, it’s all I’d write about.”