Study in Rhythm: Red and Gold (ca. 1934) | Joseph Schillinger / Smithsonian American Art Museum / CC0 1.0
I met Susan Cheever at the Carl Schurz Park dog run, on the Upper East Side, to discuss her latest book, When All the Men Wore Hats (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2025). It’s her usual morning haunt: a place where she gives her beloved Corgi a bit of free-roaming exercise, and where, almost as often, she can be found holding court with students and neighbors.
We sat on a bench at the edge of the enclosure, watching the dogs trot across the gravel. Her fall sweater echoed the jade color of her puppy’s leash, which hung slack in her hand. “I didn’t want to write it,” she said. “But before I knew it, I had a book proposal after 40 years.”
For decades, Cheever has explored how family history shapes creative enterprise. Her work often exhibits an unflinching honesty. At The New School, where she teaches memoir, Cheever brings that same candor to the classroom—reminding her students, and perhaps herself, that to tell a story is often to think about who you’re telling it to.
Elizabeth Mirabelle: You have written many books on your family, including Home Before Dark, your memoir about your father, John Cheever, just a year after his death. But as you keep saying, you didn’t want to write this book. When did you realize you did?
Susan Cheever: I started in about 2017. Writer friends of mine started taking me out to lunch because they were teaching my father’s short stories, and they knew I would know about them. And so, I started having these conversations about my father’s short stories with writers that I really admired: David Gates, Patrick McGrath, Mary Gaitskill, and my brother. So I came to think that I should be teaching these short stories because I knew so much about them. But, well, nobody was going to let me. So I decided to give a lecture at Bennington College. I wrote a lecture on the short stories, which I don’t think was particularly good, and I gave that lecture at Bennington, and everyone said, “Oh my God, it’s a book.” And I said, “No, no, no, no.”
[Shakes her head, laughing.]
Mirabelle: They knew before you …
Cheever: They knew before me. I had no idea. A year went by, maybe more, and I slowly began, to my amazement, to write a book proposal.
Mirabelle: Was that your starting point?
Cheever: We published a book of his journals that were, in fact, a box—a million words, which most people haven’t read. I read his journals and stories, of course, and I was there when he wrote them. I’m in a bunch of them, so I started writing, thinking that it might be interesting to someone. I’d been having a lot of back-and-forth with Andrew Wylie, the agent for my father’s estate, and his assistant, Rebecca. I worked with them both a lot and liked them, so I sent over my proposal to Rebecca. She called me the next day and asked if I could come in, and that was it.
Mirabelle: How did you approach the writing?
Cheever: I try to write in a way that is useful for other people. I try to write as a service.
Mirabelle: When you say to us, as your students, “Let the writing take over,” is that something you always find happens? How did you see it in this project—from proposal to publication?
Cheever: So much. For most books, for me at least, it just kind of unfolds. Earlier on, I was at a couple of parties—one at the New York Public Library, where I was talking with Wylie. I asked him if I should write a book on my father’s short stories, and he said, “Absolutely.” And then I was at another party on 79th Street and ran into my friend Jonathan Galassi, who’s at FSG. He asked me what I was working on, and I said that I was thinking about writing about my father’s short stories, and he said, “I’d buy that.” So it was like the book just wanted to get written. I’m not saying it wrote itself, but the story inside just wanted to get written.
Mirabelle: You ended up selling the book to Galassi at FSG after he told you that you could take all the time you wanted … and you took it.
Cheever: I knew I didn’t want to do it, or I wasn’t even going to do it. And then …
Mirabelle: It happened?
Cheever: It happened. Not that I didn’t work very hard on it, not that I didn’t do 10 to 15 drafts, not that I didn’t reread all the journals, not that I didn’t talk about it excessively, or get a lot of help from friends and researchers, but it just kind of wanted to get written, which was both usual and unusual.
Mirabelle: Did you find your process different than when you wrote Home Before Dark?
Cheever: It was easier in a way, although it felt the same. It was 40 years ago. Back then, I wrote with a goal in mind: to beat [biographer] Scott Donaldson. I started writing about my father when he was dying, and I thought, well, I’ll just write down all his stories, and then Donaldson took me out to lunch and said that he was going to write this book, and I thought, well, no, you’re not. So I had to beat Scott, who ended up being a really good guy—I just didn’t want him to be the one telling the world that my father was gay. I wanted someone who loved my father to tell the world that my father was gay. And so, I had to beat Scott, which gave the book a different feel for me. I also wanted to tell the world in a very loving way. It was 1982, and it was a huge scandal anyway. Still, I really tried to make that book about who he really was, and say it lovingly. I worked a lot with my father’s principal lover on that book to make sure I got it right.
Mirabelle: Did your initial intent impact the rest of the writing, or did you find that new questions emerged while writing?
Cheever: That book really had a purpose; this book sort of didn’t. Because now 40 years have gone by, and when I read those stories, I was like, Oh my God, how did he do that?
And so, the title of the book should have actually been How Did He Do That? because I was sitting right there half the time. I was reading the books he was reading, hearing the gossip he was hearing, and privy to those dinner conversations he was privy to, yet he would go in the other room and magically write these incredible short stories. Now I, a writer and a teacher, was like, How did that happen? So I decided to set out to see if I could find out, and I couldn’t. The book doesn’t have the answer; it just has the question.
Mirabelle: In your note to the reader in the beginning, you say that your real subject is “the connection of life and work.” Did you set out to write about this, or was the connection realized later on?
Cheever: Well, I set out to find out how: How do they do it? How does it happen? I mean, there he was: an ordinary guy, in a frayed sweater, eating a ham sandwich, and then he’d go in the other room and take the stuff I knew of, even though I was not a writer then (I was a kid), but I would watch him just spin this straw into gold. He used that metaphor. And I wanted to know how he did that.
Mirabelle: And do you find that the answer to that question is woven in with what you always preach—having control over the writing and not letting the writing control you?
Cheever: Yeah, I don’t know how much control he had, or how much control I have. It’s hard to tell. There’s a magical thing to it that I don’t understand. And, you know, I can teach you about 95 percent, and then you’re on your own. For some people, that’s good, and for some, it’s bad. I definitely think writing can be taught because, back in my teenage years, I was a terrible writer but ended up becoming a pretty good writer. So I know it can be taught. That is one of my core beliefs in teaching it. But there’s a piece of it that’s sort of magic.
Mirabelle: What seems to be something quite magical about writing as a practice is actually encapsulated in another fascinating question John Cheever posed that you include in this project: “Where does the real life end and the fictional story begin?” Did you ask yourself that same question when writing this book?
Cheever: It was a question we weren’t allowed to ask in the sixties or seventies, but now it’s something everyone wants to know. Who does this story belong to? Where did this story come from? So, in a way, I couldn’t write this story 10 years ago because no one was really saying, “This is what really happened,” and now you are allowed to say it.
Mirabelle: Do you believe the place where the writing comes from is the true magic in these stories?
Cheever: What he did with the facts of our life, I think, is just magic. When you write well, you get to a certain point, and then you just jump and hope for the best.
