Literary Birthday – 31 July – Susan Cheever
Happy Birthday, Susan Cheever, born on 31 July 1943.
Susan Cheever Quotes
- Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time.
- What makes someone want to be a writer? Clearly, one thing this dream requires is a ferocious hunger, a hunger for recognition, a yearning to be heard that roars through the soul with a sound so great that the stories often feel as if they are discovered rather than invented.
- Bad writing is often driven by resentment, and good writing is based on authority.
- Obsession is so extreme and so hard to imagine with the rational mind that it has a science-fiction-like quality to it—it’s almost as if the obsessed one has been taken over by a replica, a pod, a facsimile of the rational person. When one is in the grip of an obsession, everything else—children, regular meals, sleep, work—is swept away.
- I believe that the memoir is the novel of the 21st century; it’s an amazing form that we haven’t even begun to tap…we’re just getting started figuring out what the rules are.
- Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst.
Susan Cheever is an American author and a prize-winning best-selling writer well known for her memoir, her writing about alcoholism, and her intimate understanding of American history. She graduated from Brown University in 1965 and studied American Literature at New York University. She is best known for Home Before Dark, a memoir about her father, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever, and American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Her latest book is When All the Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever.
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