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I starting reading John Cheever's Stories aloud to the family at night, my old hardback copy from long back, then decided to pick up his recent bio CHEEVER by Blake Bailey.
I'm not sure I like Bailey's writing style, but the research was done and the facts are very interesting. For instance, I learned that his mother revealed (and kept repeating) that he was there just because she'd had too much to drink at a party one night and slept with his father (her husband) although they were deeply unhappy and barely spoke. I found this same explanation for a character in The Housebreaker of Shady Hill. No wonder Cheever was such a complex person.
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