John Cheever poses for a portrait with his wife, Mary Cheever, on March 13, 1964, at their home in Ossining, New York. Photograph by David Gahr/Getty Images.

Jim was too tired to make even a pretense of sociability, and there was nothing about the dinner to hold Irene’s interest, so her attention wandered from the food to the deposits of silver polish on the candlesticks and from there to the music in the other room. She listened for a few minutes to a Chopin prelude and then was surprised to hear a man’s voice break in. “For Christ’s sake, Kathy,” he said, “do you always have to play the piano when I get home?” The music stopped abruptly. “It’s the only chance I have,” a woman said. “I’m at the office all day.” “So am I,” the man said. He added something obscene about an upright piano, and slammed a door. The passionate and melancholy music began again.

“Did you hear that?” Irene asked.

— from “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever, originally published in The New Yorker in 1947

I was the model for a group of mischievous, neglected, wise-before-their-time prepubescent girls who did everything from getting lost to nabbing the nuts put out for cocktails, and my mother was my father’s one-woman university for the study of women—especially pretty, selfish women. “The Enormous Radio” was written in early 1947, and it features the superficially attractive family that often opens my father’s short stories, whether they are set in New York City or in the suburbs that line the Hudson River—the Rhine of America. In this story, written when we lived in the brick apartment building at 400 East Fifty-Ninth Street near the East River, Jim and Irene Westcott and their two children live in an Upper East Side apartment building near the East River. They are an ordinary family except for one unusual thing: their love of music. They share an eccentric passion for Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach. They love the Chopin études and thrill to the Fifth Symphony. How can this be a problem? How could this enthusiasm unravel their perfect lives?

If the Westcotts have a guilty secret, something that sets them apart from the neighbors in their prewar brick building with its doorman and awning, it is this music. They are moved by Schubert quartets in a world where many people have adjusted their ears to silence, traffic noise, or the ambient music piped into public spaces. But as the Westcotts find out when a new radio triumphantly bought to replace the old one comes into their living room, their neighbors have a less savory assortment of guilty secrets.

At first, when Irene Westcott realizes that her radio is broadcasting their neighbor’s lives, she is thrilled. “Isn’t this too divine?” she asks her husband, when the radio picks up a party in their building upstairs. “Try something else. See if you can get those people in 18-C.” The magic of the radio that broadcasts other people’s lives seems to switch on something less than magic in the soul of Irene Westcott. She begins to wonder about other people’s secrets. She is obsessed. She turns on the radio secretly late at night to see what’s going on in the human hive that buzzes in the building around her.

“The Enormous Radio” is an early story, but it has many of the characteristics of my father’s later and most accomplished work. It depends on a twist in the laws of nature, a brush with the supernatural that seems entirely natural. Most radios do not actually broadcast neighbors’ voices, whether they are, as in the story, the sweetly Irish syllables of the Sweeneys’ nurse reciting Edward Lear in 17-B or the angry voice of Mr. Osborn beating his wife in 16-C. This messing with the world as it is, this exaggeration that spills over into fantasy, this sci-fi dimension, doesn’t reappear in my father’s stories until the sixties.

In “Metamorphoses,” a trio of stories published in 1963, a man named Larry Acteon is killed by local dogs after he stumbles into a scene he shouldn’t see, and a woman addicted to smoking literally turns into a cigarette. The revelatory epiphany that this kind of slipping in and out of reality can provide is at its most powerful in “The Swimmer,” published more than a decade later.

Of course, in “The Enormous Radio,” the radio, once a source of feeling and pleasure—like the swimming pools and country houses and sandy beaches in later stories—becomes the source of bitter disappointment and anger. Jim comes home to find his wife addicted to other people’s sorrows. Suddenly he is sick of the radio, which was expensive to buy and repair, and he is just as suddenly sick of her as well.

The Westcotts’ secrets begin to leak out of the pretty container of their young marriage. “Why are you so Christly all of a sudden?” Jim yells at his wife. “You stole your mother’s jewelry before they probated her will.” What about the people she has made miserable, he demands, and by the way, what about her abortion? “You packed your bag and went off to have that child murdered as if you were going to Nassau.” The story ends, as many of the stories end, with fortune reversed, the self-congratulatory couple disgraced, the happy turned miserable, all success transformed into bitter failure as the seemingly contented family at the beginning of the story sinks into the misery that is there for all of us.

Almost every Cheever story features a major reversal of fortune. Even as the Westcotts are happily prosperous at the beginning of the story, by the end they are not. Sometimes reversals go in the other direction. The stories of Johnny Hake in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and the disdainful narrator of “The Angel of the Bridge” start with a serious problem and end when the problem is magically solved. My father loved epiphanies and surprises, no matter which direction they headed.

In another way, this story of a broken radio foretells the stories to come. My mother was the model for Irene Westcott; again the lines between fiction and nonfiction are blurry here. In some ways the sixty-one short stories in The Stories of John Cheever trace the trajectory of my parents’ marriage, or rather the arc that began with my father’s enchantment with my mother and her family and the initial sweetness of being what the culture required—a heterosexual young man courting a pretty woman.

“I am so proud of my family,” he wrote soon after we moved to the suburbs. “I love to walk with them on a Sunday.” His children made him happy. His glimpses of a Norman Rockwell life with a handsome wife and children and regular dinner table scenes made him happy. There was safety and joy in the family rituals, and he added to them when he could. Every Sunday night, for instance, he decreed we would each recite a poem that we had memorized during the week.

We started out reasonably—I memorized Robert Frost, he went for a Yeats sonnet, my mother knocked off Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,” and Ben chimed in with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Bed in Summer.” At first we all sat in the living room chairs and on the couch, my parents with their drinks, a dog under the piano. Soon enough my father and I were furiously competing on Sunday nights. We stood at the dining room table and declaimed to the room. He memorized the endless Tennyson dirge about a nineteenth-century Crimean battle: “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” “Cannon to right of them, / Cannon to left of them, / … Into the jaws of Death / … Rode the six hundred,” he thundered out. I countered with John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Barbara Frietchie,” a lengthy tirade in couplets about a pro-Union Maryland heroine and her indignant outrage at Stonewall Jackson. I too liked to stand up while reciting. “ ‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, / But spare your country’s flag,’ ” I thundered.

By the next Sunday my father had memorized Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”: “Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs.” I went for Longfellow’s “Evangeline”: “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, / Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight.” My mother and my brother dropped out.

In the early stories, my mother is pretty, sometimes clueless, and always delighted by life’s twists and turns. By the end of my father’s writing career, the fictional wife is cold, sarcastic, and bitchy, a promiscuous and egomaniacal gold digger. My parents’ marriage over forty years and three children turned sour, then bitter, with intermittent periods of peace and very occasional happy times. The stories follow suit.

In real life, my mother was a pushover, a sweetheart, a woman whose love went out with unusual fervor and speed to anyone in need, sick, or downtrodden. She was sometimes an indifferent mother to me, but when I was sick, she was an angel. My weight and my eating habits, my failures at school and with other children, my difficult behavior, and my unwieldy looks were often the subject of her barbed commentaries. But when I was ill, as I often was, she cooked me delicious noodles and soups to tempt my appetite; she brought me presents and sat by my bed and read for hours. It was when I was sick during a vacation from college that my parents decided I should have a car, a red convertible VW.

Perhaps my mother’s sympathy for the ill and disabled was due to the fact that her own mother had been sick most of the time my mother was a child—she died when my mother was twelve. As a result of her loving kindness toward those who had been ignored by others, she was often followed by people who had somehow wandered into her life and stayed to be taken care of. In later years, these strays would live for a while in the guest room off the kitchen, to my father’s horror.

When they met, he was twenty-six—on his way. More importantly, seen through the eyes of this pretty, privileged, and traumatized twenty-year-old who had just graduated from Sarah Lawrence with a crush on her teacher Joseph Campbell and hoped to be a poet, he was a young man in need of a wife. They had both experienced the disintegration of their families.

Did she know he was also gay? In his long campaign to tell a fictional story about his love of women—a campaign that took as much energy as anything he wrote for The New Yorker—my mother was my father’s most important audience. He did love women; he mostly loved and lusted after men. When did she realize that the needy, charming, electrifying young man she had met in the elevator at her first job—typing for my father’s literary agent—was lit up by a secret?

By 1947, when my parents went to see Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway, a play that hinges on Blanche’s former marriage to a gay man, she had certainly guessed. Still, in those postwar years, how could a woman with no experience in sexuality have imagined that the up-and-coming father of her children was also sexually interested in the handyman in their fancy Fifty-Ninth Street building? My parents had been married for almost ten years, and her marriage to my father had made it possible for her to be friends with her own father and stepmother.

By marrying my father, my mother changed her family status from being the pretty wannabe poet whom no one took seriously, to being the wife of a man they took very seriously. He and she had lived together through the war and were now busy conforming to the postwar ideal. My father had become friends with my grandparents. My mother had met and disliked my father’s brother. It wasn’t even that she chose not to blow up their life together—she didn’t have the explosives to make it happen.

For most of the twentieth century in this country, homophobia was endemic and almost universal. “Homosexual acts were illegal in forty-nine states, with punishments ranging from fines to prison time, including life sentences,” Kathryn Schulz writes in her New Yorker essay about Jeanne Manford, a rare New York mother who did not cast out her gay son in the sixties and seventies. “Same-sex attraction was classified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association and routinely mocked and condemned by everyone from elementary-school kids to elected officials.” Men like my father lost their jobs and had no legal recourse; there were no gay politicians, teachers, or leaders; and the words homosexual and pervert were used interchangeably.

With such a secret, as Jane Isay, a psychiatrist whose husband hid his sexuality from her and his children for decades, wrote in her book Secrets and Lies, “Fragmentation is the rule. Honesty and closeness are the enemy.” My father already had a secret life. To complicate matters, his livelihood—writing fiction—also redrew the truth. As he skillfully used both his storytelling ability and his desperate fear of discovery to manipulate the events of their lives, my mother became more and more isolated. Gaslighting was just the beginning when it came to the abilities of this fiction writer living another fiction that he drew on for his, well, fiction to create fiction. No wonder my father never wanted to write nonfiction! Truth was his great enemy; at the same time, he found a way to tell the truth of the human heart.

My father’s connection to my mother was overshadowed in many ways by his connection to her family and to the hillside in New Hampshire where we all spent our summers in what I still think of as one of the most beautiful places on earth. “The Day the Pig Fell into the Well,” published in 1954, seven productive years after “The Enormous Radio” but still more than a year before my father’s first novel, is a kind of second-stage story about my parents’ marriage and my father’s love affair with my mother’s entire family. That family was centered on their summer place, Treetops, in Bridgewater, New Hampshire, which, in “Goodbye, My Brother,” written in 1951, becomes Laud’s Head on the New England coast and in the story of the Nudd family becomes Whitebeach Camp in the Adirondacks.

When my father turned the story in to Bill Maxwell, his editor at The New Yorker, Maxwell suggested a few changes that made him nervous. Usually Maxwell’s edits were minimal. “Finished the pig,” my father wrote in his journals, “but by taking out Russell’s alcoholism I may have weakened it. Mrs. Nudd would think that he was the only one of them who had grown old; the neon lights of the Motel burned in the distance like embers; the television voices carried across the water. He has jeopardized paradise. That most of their happiness and their understanding is centered in this season and this place.”

By the time my father got to Treetops, the place and the family were run with an organized and hierarchical hand. My grandfather, Milton Charles Winternitz, had been the dean of Yale Medical School. Everyone called him Winter. His students built him a laboratory above his house in New Hampshire with a plaque that announced in Latin, UBI BRUMA VENIT HEIMS (Where winter comes in the summer). Handsome and agile, he was a famous teacher who had built the medical school from scratch, married a student—the beautiful and wealthy Helen Watson—and set his course with five children, only to be derailed by his wife’s death. Winter’s second act—his marriage to a brilliant New Haven social star, Mrs. Stephen Whitney—was even more thrilling. Winter and my father adored each other.

My father also adored Polly Whitney and her four children, and so his presence in New Hampshire made my mother’s life easier. In the evenings, after a long dinner on the wide porch that looks down over the lawns of Treetops to the lake and the mountains beyond it—a landscape—dotted with white church spires and evening stars—my parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents would loiter over coffee and a few more drinks and play backgammon and tell family stories. “As if the opening note of a sextet had been sounded, the others would all rush in to take their familiar parts, like those families who sing Gilbert and Sullivan, and the recital would go on for an hour or more,” my father wrote in “The Day the Pig Fell into the Well.” “The perfect days—and there had been hundreds of them—seemed to have passed into their consciousness without a memory, and they returned to this chronicle of small disasters as if it were the genesis of summer.”

For me, as a child and later as an adult, the intense piney beauty of the setting, the undulating carpet of stars flowing below the Big Dipper down to the wooded horizon, the sunset blazing out as if fires had been banked just below the edge of the world, the smells of newly mown grass and the cool moss under the pine trees over by the rock shaped like a ship where my cousins and I played pirate, made the murmur of adult lamentations comforting and summery.

My great-grandfather had bought the land hoping to establish a dynasty after he became rich from helping Alexander Graham Bell invent the telephone. A fervent socialist—he gave away the bulk of his fortune—he built a group of rustic shacks around a central kitchen. His son-in-law, Winter, was not a socialist, at least when it came to summers. He built a much fancier architected two-story house with a tiled terrace and lily ponds under a huge sugar maple farther down the hill.

This house—Winter and Polly’s house—was the emotional and psychic center of the place, although it was set down a steep slope away from the others. The Stone House, as Winter named it, was fragrant with Polly’s daily flower arrangements and redolent of the cigarettes everyone was smoking all the time. Within the Whitney-­Winternitz family, everyone played a role. My aunt Buff, who had been brilliant at Vassar, was the rebel, while my uncle Tom’s wife, Elizabeth, was the plain one. My aunt Janie was the baby, and her husband, Joe, was the all-­around Good Guy; my uncle Bill was the wise one, and my uncle Freddy was the gay one, although of course that was never said aloud. Freddy owned an antique shop in Bar Harbor and lived alternately with his mother and with a male friend. He had a dachshund. He was fun to be around and never scolded us. In this world of glamour, hard drinking, and very specific roles, my father had nothing to fear. He swam the crawl! He had a pretty wife and children! He despised antiques and bric-a-brac. He did not cook. He steered clear of pink clothes and went to the kitchen only to make drinks.

My father’s life and work followed parallel trajectories. The path of his marriage in life and in art went from his early gratitude for my mother and her sympathetic nature and the safety of her family, through decades of irritation and mutual torture in which she kept his secret and he punished her for that, to a kind of armed truce in which she became—according to him as a man and as a writer—an unreasonable and sharp-tongued and cheating bitch, and finally after he got sober and then after he got sick, to an exhausted, sweet truce.

His two families—his mother and father and Fred on one side and my mother’s distinguished, difficult crowd on the other—also seemed in sharp contrast. My father and Fred drove up to Boston to help their mother move to a smaller house as her circumstances diminished. First the two brothers drank all the whiskey they could find. Then they got into a fight. “I spoke sharply, partly I suppose from some old sibling jealousy,” my father confided to his journal later in the week. “The feeling that I have here is not comparable to the feeling that I have at Tree Tops; it is filial sentiment once removed at TT. With Mother I cannot strike a completely satisfactory relationship because many of her energies are the energies of anxiety; but she is admirable; she did not once ask for sympathy on her moving; and she is a very old woman.”

When my father was alive, I thought I understood the unhappiness my parents caused each other. I too had loved someone to distraction, only to find years later that I could hardly stand him. Looking back, I see how little I knew. I thought they should divorce, and they often spoke of it and asked me to find them good lawyers. My father would joke about it. Do you want me to be an old man alone walking a dog on a rope? he would ask. At that point he flagrantly declared his love for another woman as often as he could manage it: Hope Lange, the beautiful actress he had met when her husband Alan Pakula wanted to make a movie of The Wapshot Chronicle. Nancy Miner, an adoring student from when he was teaching at Iowa.

“People named John and Mary never divorce,” he wrote in the journal. “For better or for worse, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep and commit mayhem but they are not free to divorce. Tom Dick and Harry go to Reno on a whim but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.”

Without the protection of my mother and his marriage, without the camouflage of the role he loved to play at the head of the table in Ossining, without the Famous Writer cloak that he treasured when it became available, the cloak that made his true sexuality invisible to me and to reporters, he might have been exposed as the complicated gay man he was. “So the boundless continents of anxiety appear. I will be described as an impostor, a bum sponging off the government and the corp of Yaddo, a cheap social climber, an imitation gentleman,” he mused in the journal one day in 1964, after “The Swimmer” had sold to the movies. “The sale of my books will stop, the Hollywood producer will cancel the sale because I am an obscene character, I will be tempted if not forced to destroy myself. But all of this is nonsense. I have nothing to be ashamed of. How could I possibly be destroyed?”

Secrets of this magnitude have a life of their own. The father I knew was not really there as he sat day after day typing on his Olivetti portable—he liked to keep everything portable. The real John Cheever was somehow distilled into his pages, pages that hid the man in a way that created an incandescent landscape, a landscape everyone could connect with and no one could quite understand. Did living a lie help him create the lie that is the truth of fiction? The best lies, as he well knew, are the ones that sail closest to the truth. The best fiction is fiction that seems to be real.

My father’s sexuality was one of the central facts of my parents’ marriage, a fact made more powerful because it was hidden. Now, forty years after his death, I am beginning to grasp how much of our lives were colored by this lie and this coruscating fear. My father lived often in darkness, although his prose is filled with light. His story makes me sad. If he had been born in another time—if he had been born now—his life could have completely different. As it was, he was afraid of everyone—anyone, friend or stranger, could casually announce his secret and blow his life apart.

My mother lived in the half light of knowing my father’s secret and choosing not to know. Others guessed, however. Looking back on my father’s career at The New Yorker, I have often wondered how they got away with treating him as shabbily as they did. Their connection started out as a love affair in 1935 when the magazine bought the stories “Brooklyn Rooming House” and “Buffalo” in quick succession—both stories about ordinary people fumbling through desperate lives. My father adored his editor Gus Lobrano, and with William Maxwell, who succeeded Lobrano, he got even better. “We have great hopes for Cheever,” Maxwell wrote to Geraldine Mavor, my father’s agent in 1939. “Even in this story there is that special quality which he gives to his things and which is exactly right for The New Yorker.” Coming from the man who had turned down Auden’s great war poem “September 1, 1939,” this was high praise. It continued. When Harold Ross, the magazine’s founder and editor, came back from vacation, he wrote of “The Enormous Radio,” “That piece is worth coming back to work for. It will turn out to be a memorable one, or I am a fish. Very wonderful indeed.” Although he was thrilled to be published by The New Yorker, my father was always trying to better the magazine by taking chances, pushing against the bounds of naturalism, dreaming beyond the you-and-me couples who so often watched their lives turn sour. By the fifties, when my father was writing masterpieces, his connection to The New Yorker and to Maxwell was fraying. He began reaching for wilder and wilder endings, more vivid metaphors, similes like this one in “The Season of Divorce” that Ben Yagoda calls “one of the most spectacular similes in the history of fiction”: “There was a loud rapping on the radiator, a signal from the people upstairs for decorum and silence—urgent and expressive, like the communications that prisoners send to one another through the plumbing in a penitentiary.”

Now, sixty years later, when I have more facts, I wonder why he was so loyal to Maxwell, a man with his own complicated sexuality. I don’t want to use a word like blackmail—the New Yorker run by William Shawn was, above all things, genteel—but my father’s fears of exposure made him easy to manipulate. He was not a weak man, but perhaps his secret made him weak. When the break finally came, and The New Yorker wanted to placate him, he joked about it. He said that instead of a raise, they had offered him “the key to the men’s room and all the bread and cheese he could eat.” The key to the men’s room!

I found out that my father was gay a few months after he died. He had kept copious journals, typed in small notebooks since the forties. He knew what they contained, and perhaps that was why he had some loony fear about the IRS finding them and overvaluing them after his death. He talked about this a lot. He let my brother Ben read some of them. Ben looked up from reading them once and saw that our father was weeping. He hid the journals in cabinets and boxes and in a silver drawer in the dining room and even under the bed in my old bedroom. He instructed me to secretly get rid of them after he died.

When he died in 1982, his good friend the art dealer Eugene Thaw and I drove the boxes into New York City and put them safely into Morgan Manhattan, on Third Avenue and Eighty-First Street. In those days Morgan Manhattan was a grand old institution where wealthy people’s discarded lawn furniture—Granny Abernathy’s teak bench—shared space with real treasures like the Pollocks and Degas in Gene’s storage room.

When my father died, my own story about our lives as a family was still intact. I had written it in my mind as nonfiction—don’t we all write our stories as nonfiction?—but it was fiction. I was married with a two-month-old daughter. When my brother had once mentioned that he thought my father was gay, I was outraged and surprised! My husband, who knew my father well, agreed. One of the things we shared was an understanding of my father, his work, and The New Yorker, where my husband had also published for decades. He got paid better than my father ever had, much better. My father’s death was tragic, but we knew how to go on. Our family stories were safe. My identity as a novelist and the only daughter of a handsome and distinguished man was fixed. That’s what I thought.

Then, as he was dying in the upstairs bedroom of the house in Ossining, I started casually writing about him. I had written three novels by then and had a contract for another one. Instead of working on my novel, I found myself just typing out the many stories he had told over the years—I was afraid they would be lost. I couldn’t help myself. I did not know that I was tinkering with my own future. I forgot about the power of stories. After he died, I kept writing. At some point a few months into my writing—I didn’t yet admit I was writing a book—I thought it would be fun to look at those journals that had been so dear to his heart. Gene drove me back to Morgan Manhattan, and we opened the door to his storage room. The hinges creaked; a ray of light lit up the dusty air.

I knelt down on the cement floor and opened the top box of my father’s journals, thinking I would grab a few and go. One of the notebooks fell open. Cocks, hands, sucking, desire, mouths. I flipped through the pages. More cocks, more longing, more sucking. I opened another notebook. What I found out in those dusty minutes kneeling on the floor of a storage room changed many things in my life. The journals told the story: my father had been hungrily, passionately, furiously gay. He had fucked students and friends and anyone who would have him, and I mean fucked. My patrician literary father, with his elegant manners and Brooks Brothers shirts—a man adored for his glorious writing—was not the man I thought he was. Not at all.

It turned out that other people already knew this secret. My brother Ben had guessed. My brother Fred said he’d suspected and wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t sure how to tell my mother, but of course she—somehow—already knew. Did she realize that the nice young men who appeared at the house as my father’s literary protégés were actually his lovers? Did she think as she cooked for all of us about what was actually happening?

It was 1982, I was writing about my father, but I still did not think I was writing a book. Then a man named Scott Donaldson announced in a letter to my mother that he was going to write a biography of my father. Donaldson was a professor at William and Mary. He took me out to lunch. He said he knew my father was gay, and he let me know that his book was going to reveal that. I had been a writer for years, but Donaldson was not talking to me as a fellow writer—he was talking to me as a daughter, as a little girl, although I was almost forty years old. Once again I had that feeling of being usurped. Donaldson made it sound as if he were the child my father would have preferred. I decided right then and there that I would be the one to reveal my father’s sexuality and that I would find a loving way to do it. This man was not about to traffic in my family secrets. I would beat him to it, and I did.

Even so, even in 1984, revealing my father’s sexuality, which I did in a few pages more than halfway through the book, turned out to be a problem that overwhelmed the response to it. People still hated and feared homosexuals in the early eighties. That a man with children whom they’d admired might be gay was unthinkable. I got a lot of hate mail. How could I say these terrible things about my father? The New York Times ran a long article about the “controversy”: Was John Cheever gay? Sales of the book stopped; I became famous as the woman who had outed her father. One letter I got just had SHAME written across the page in red letters.

Reading my father’s journals now, I’m amazed at my own gullibility. That day in 1982, I took the notebooks out of Gene’s room and rented my own cubicle, and over the next month I read them all. It was a bittersweet experience. In the millions of words he wrote, I was mentioned less than a dozen times. My brothers did not fare better. There was a lot of longing for sex with men. Men I had thought were pleasant literary hangers-on were actually objects of desire, fulfilled and unfulfilled. Many of the journals’ pages were devoted to complaints about my mother’s coldness and my mother’s self-pity and my mother’s obsession with politics or teaching or anything outside their marriage. A close second in the journals were his longings for sex with men and wrestling with the dreadful shame and fear that these longings engendered.

“I black out with a sleeping pill,” he wrote in 1965—after twenty-five years of marriage. “My prayers for the alleviation of bitterness go unanswered. Did you see Virginia Woolf, people ask. Why should I, I reply. I get that kind of a performance nightly for nothing. She is a nut, I think. She is a nut.”

By the time my father wrote “O Youth and Beauty!” their marriage had progressed to a new, suburban stage. Another story that is deeply indebted to Hemingway in general and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” in particular, this story takes place in the familiar Cheever suburbia, a place of lawns and cocktail parties, men commuting from the station and children weeping and country club bills going unpaid. “By the standards of Shady Hill, the Bentleys were a happily married couple,” the narrator tells us. Louise Bentley has a life like my mother’s, getting her two children here and there, doing the laundry, shopping and cooking. Every now and then the Bentleys have an ugly fight fueled by Cash Bentley’s business failures, and Louise Bentley’s self-pitying view of her wifely and maternal duties.

Cash Bentley has one lovely eccentricity. He was a track star back in college and sometimes, as parties wind down, he rearranges the furniture in the room, asks another man to fire a starter pistol, and gracefully bounds through a domestic steeplechase, hurdling over sofas and coffee tables leaping as he once did as a young athlete. He sticks the landing, there is some polite applause, and the party is over.

One of my father’s great themes was the passage of time. Nothing ever stands still in a Cheever story. Cash, of course, is getting older. His hair is thinning. He watches his weight, but tempus fugit. Another aging athlete, my father’s brother, Fred, lived across the street. Dudley Schoales, formerly a great football player, lived down the road.

Soon enough one of Cash Bentley’s improvised hurdle races ends with a broken leg. Unlike Hemingway’s Francis Macomber, Cash Bentley doesn’t have a moment of triumphant masculinity. Instead, he has increasing desperation. His final race begins with him snapping at his wife, Louise, about how to hold the starter pistol. She clumsily figures it out as he takes the first leap. “The pistol went off and Louise got him in midair. She shot him dead.”

By 1963, my parents’ marriage had disintegrated further, and the marriages in my father’s short stories were definitely on the rocks. In “An Educated American Woman,” my father’s portrait of a heartless mother finally, finally caused some trouble with his real-life model—my mother. By this time, my actual mother had found an exciting and rich community of friends, as well as jobs and interests outside her marriage. She was a beloved teacher and began to get involved in local politics, joining the League of Women Voters and becoming part of an effort to stop construction of a highway at the edge of the Hudson River.

“An Educated American Woman” doesn’t actually make much sense except in terms of the writer’s furious reaction to feminine abandonment. The fictional portrait of my mother, a woman who worries alternately about the size of her breasts and the state of the world, begins with a dead-on excerpt from her college alumni magazine. Sometimes my father, as a writer, seemed to understand my mother better than she understood herself. Sometimes she baffled him.

He thought about writing a “piece about the man who discovers that his wife has a personality completely independent of his. That in loving and marrying her he seemed to absorb her character and her body in some effusion or discharge that made her his member, his limb or rib. But in the middle of life she disengaged herself and emerged with a fully developed personality of her own … He seemed to share his house with an utter stranger but a stranger who was untroubled by the situation. The sense of how meteoric is our progress through life. How keen is our dependence upon the ambience, the cloud of well-tempered gasses upon which we subsist, how indifferent we are to the atmosphere beyond our galaxial formations and that what we take for supreme sympathy is only a corresponding taste in gasses.”

In the short story in question, published in October 1963, an adorable little boy named Bibber—a little boy very much like my beloved seven-year-old brother Fred—is left alone by his mother while she goes out on some political tear. In the story, she is testifying before the highway commission. Bibber’s father, George, finds the boy in bed, alone, and very, very sick. “Georgie moistened the boy’s lips with some water, and Bibber regained consciousness long enough to throw his arms around his father.” The doctor’s line is busy busy busy, and by the time the ambulance comes for Bibber it’s too late.

The story of her son dying because of her negligence was too much even for my mother—a woman who by 1963 was certainly accustomed to recognizing herself in my father’s short stories. My father didn’t ask her permission, of course—it was ART and it had nothing to do with real life! This time she protested to my father’s New Yorker editor William Maxwell. He too told her that the story was literature and that any comparisons between the story and her life were unimportant. She was reducing literature to gossip. Even some of my parents’ friends, including Tanya Litvinov, a Russian intellectual and brilliant translator, whom my father revered, thought he had gone too far.

This time, in response to Tanya, my father came up with a different excuse. “No one likes Bibber’s demise,” he wrote to Tanya. But, he explained, that little boy in the story was not my brother Fred nor even my brother Ben. It was him! The little boy was my father! “When I was eleven I was attacked by a virulent strain of tuberculosis. A few days after the crisis my mother covered me with a blanket, gave me a pile of clean rags in which I might bleed and went off to chair some committee for the General Welfare. As a healthy man I expect I should be grateful to be alive and to have had so conscientious a parent, but what I would like to forget is the empty house and the fear of death.”

The most egregious example of my father arguing with my mother in his fiction is his 1970 story “The Fourth Alarm,” published seven years after Bibber’s fictional death and five years before my father got sober and stopped, incidentally, sacrificing his family’s private lives to his art. By this time, his drinking was at the forefront of his mind and in the mind of anyone who cared about him. His journals are filled with countdowns to the first drink, calculations about secret drinking and sharp regrets about things said and done while drinking. There were many trips to the hospital; the doctor became a family friend.

“I get my drinking schedule balled up,” he wrote on a typical morning. “At half-past ten I take the flask and silver cup out of the car and bring it up here. I’ve never done this. I drink a jigger and then a second. It is a little like perversion. I am doing that which I should not do and I am enjoying it. My reminiscences take on deeper and richer colors. It is easy to kill the time … At half-past eleven I drink two martinis and eat a sandwich. I take the dogs for a walk around Kuttners, drink another martini and eat my soup. By this time I am both drowsy and groggy and when M comes home at quarter to two I snap at her. The difficulties of a man being around a house at noon.”

My mother was a great teacher, literate, imaginative, and passionately grateful to the students who treated her with respect. My father’s opposition made teaching hard for her. He did not approve. The nadir of her career, or of their marriage, or both, was at the Rockland Country Day School, where, as a popular teacher, she had been asked to take part in the students’ annual play. She had the small part of an onstage bride. She had no lines; all she had to do was appear onstage in a white dress.

At the last minute, my father chose to attend the performance. When, in the play, the student playing the minister asked whether anyone had reason why the couple should not be married, my father did not forever hold his peace. He stood unsteadily in the audience, a famous writer reeking of gin, and protested. Yes, he did have an objection, he shouted out to the students at the footlights. The woman onstage was his wife!

The moment effectively ended my mother’s teaching career and also shattered again the line between life and art that my father had been so eager to protect. To no one’s surprise, the incident ended up in a short story, in which the protagonist husband is not an obstreperous drunk but a baffled hero. In “The Fourth Alarm,” the narrator’s wife is also a teacher asked to participate in a student play. Only in the story, unlike in real life, she is naked, simulates copulation, and takes part in a naked “love pile” with the audience. We all knew it was dangerous to argue with my father; your argument might end up in the pages of The New Yorker, with my father transformed into an innocent and your argument eviscerated.

For years the war between my parents raged, and my father’s stories reflected it in a crowd of dreadful women married to sweet, great-hearted men who sometimes had a  little drinking problem. Then my father got sober. Everything changed. Around this time, my mother was offered an editing job at a new magazine in Westchester County. She quickly came to feel that she had been hired for her connections rather than her skills. She complained about it to all of us; we sympathized. We had all had the experience of being flattered for what we thought was our talent, only to find we were being flattered for my father’s talent.

My father—now, in sobriety, my mother’s advocate—took action. He wrote a story especially for this Westchester magazine called “The Night Mummy Got the Wrong Mink Coat.” It’s a satirical romp that takes place after dinner at a country club. The couple is happy; the ending is happy. My father signed the story with a pseudonym, Louisa Spingarn. My mother turned it in to her editors.

The editors, who had been hoping for a John Cheever story—who in fact unbeknown to them had indeed received a John Cheever story—hemmed and hawed. They had some questions about the story. Who was this Louisa Spingarn? My mother told them, at my father’s suggestion, that Louisa Spingarn was a kind of latter-day Emily Dickinson. The editors didn’t get it. They said the story was too short—could Ms. Spingarn make it longer? My mother said no. The whole adventure played out at our family dinner table with high hilarity. Finally, deciding that it was too much of a “woman’s piece,” the editors rejected it. By the time The New Yorker published it under the name of its real author, my mother had left another job behind.

This essay is excerpted from When All The Men Wore Hats, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this month. 

Susan Cheever is the author of numerous novels and many books on American history, including Drinking in America: Our Secret History. She is also the author of My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson―His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Home Before Dark, a memoir about her father, John Cheever. She teaches at Bennington College and the New School in their M.F.A. programs.