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Join us for a reading with Susan Cheever as she sits down with Luis Jaramillo to discuss her new book When All the Men Wore Hats.
Moderated by Luis Jaramillo, Associate Professor of Writing and Chair of Fiction at The New School.
About the Book:
In When All the Men Wore Hats, Susan Cheever looks back on her father’s work and seeks to understand the connections between art and life. How did a bit of local gossip, a slice of Greek myth, and a new translation of Madame Bovary somehow become a brilliant gem like “The Country Husband” or “The Swimmer”? In her 1984 book Home Before Dark, published two years after her father’s death, Cheever wrote movingly about her father and the secrets he kept, but here, years later, she tells the story of the remarkable stories themselves, six of which appear in full in the book’s appendix.
“Using six of John Cheever’s stories as points of reference, Cheever serves as a masterful captain, urging When All the Men Wore Hats to deftly navigate the murky boundaries between biography, memoir, criticism, and craft lesson.” —Stephen Patrick Bell, BOMB
""Simultaneously a tribute to her father and an exposé of his failings, Cheever’s narrative offers bittersweet grace to a man whose life was a kind of fiction and whose fiction drew mercilessly from his life. It’s equal parts wrenching and edifying."" —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Presented by the Creative Writing Program at The New School for Social Research.
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Susan Cheever is the author of many books on American history, the most recent of which is Drinking in America: Our Secret History, published in 2015. She is also the author of numerous novels; My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson—His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous, a biography of the Alcoholics Anonymous cofounder Bill Wilson; and Home Before Dark, a memoir about her father, John Cheever. She teaches at Bennington College and the New School in their MFA programs.
