Originally Published Online by Book of the Month Club and QPB book clubs.

On Alcoholism, the Writing Life, and Being a Single Mom
by Caz Springer In Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker, Susan Cheever explores the origins of her alcoholism, and recounts her adventures and loves as serious wine drinker who comes to discover that she is an alcoholic. We talked on the phone about alcoholism, her father, writer John Cheever, and her life as a writer who happens also to be a fifty-something single mother of a teenager and a third-grader.

Caz Springer:
This morning I was looking for a picture I have of your father from a magazine cover where he's wearing an oversized hand-knit pink tie. I've had it for years.

Susan Cheever:
I have it actually. The thing about the that photograph that's so interesting, to me is that my father was dying at the time. It's clear to me looking at the photograph Richard Avedon knew that, in his bones not in his head and we didn't know it. Maybe my father knew it, in his bones not in his head. But it was taken in August or early September.

On December sixth they told him that he had terminal cancer and that it had gone to his bones. It's the last picture. If you look at it there's a kind of intensity to his eyes. If you know what happened three months later, it makes a dreadful kind of sense. It's a wonderful photograph.

CS:
Could you tell me something of what it was like to read the journals and learn of your father's secret life?

SC:
It was very difficult. It was a long time ago. I don't know what Kubler-Ross' categories are but I think they are similar categories for lots of similar experiences. When I read the journals I went through many different stages of feeling. At first I was surprised. Then I was angry, and then I was bitter, and then I was interested. Now it's so much a part of my life, what I read in those journals that day in 1983, that it's hard for me to distinguish what my feelings are. I was very sad that my father had to keep such an important part of his life secret for so long. I know how much he suffered over it. I'm very sad that he wasn't able to be able to come out and enjoy himself. It's sad he lived in a time when to be gay was that frightening. I wish for him that he would have had the freedom that he might have had now. I don't know what he would have done with that freedom, but I know that he was very frightened that someone would have found out. His friend got arrested and hauled off the Smith campus to jail, for having pornographic photographs in his room. It was a different time. Now my main feeling is a feeling of sadness that he had to keep all of that secret and that he had to agonize over it.

CS:
One thing I've always liked about your father's stories since I discovered them as a teenager was that he wrote as an outsider who passed as an insider in suburbia.

SC:
Well a lot of his stories are about that. They are about going to a party and being asked to use the service entrance and being exposed somehow. Or about falling through that idyllic surface, "The Swimmer" is an obvious example. I don't want to speculate about his frame of mind. Most writers feel like outsiders all the time. I certainly feel like an outsider.

CS:
That was my next question.

SC:
The place where I feel most comfortable now is with other third grade parents in the mornings and in the afternoons. But if I think about it, they don't really know who I am. And if they did then I'd feel like an impostor there, even though I do have a third grade child. I think to be a writer is to have a very weird relationship to society. You're always an observer even when you're a participant. In a way I am an outsider. The other third grade parents are at least 10 years younger than I am. But that's the one place where I feel less like an outsider.

CS:
There's that bond of parenthood.

SC:
I do have a lot of the same concerns and I love a lot of those parents. I think when you see people with their kids you see into their souls. I wrote about this in my Newsday column. Last year the second graders were released into this play yard in the back of the school and we'd just hang out there for hours. This year the kids are older and they leave the class rooms by themselves and come out the front door. I miss those hours hanging out in the school yard which was idyllic.

CS:
Are you making the birthday party circuit?

SC:
Yeah, I do. Although at nine you don't get to stay. It's a 'buy the present—drop it off' situation. I don't know if strict is the right word, but I'm no push-over as a parent. My son gets to have one child for every year of his age in my living room which is not large. It fact, this time the children threatened to almost not fit into the living room. And he has a cake which sometimes I bake and sometimes I don't. Some of the parties from my daughter's generation were really extravagant, but my son goes to public school which is really another thing all together.

CS:
How did you make that choice?

SC:
There was no way I could afford to send him to private school. My daughter is on a scholarship.I was on the Internet last night, and there is this torrent of anger that's coming at me about my book. A lot of it is saying why wasn't she ruined financially. Well of course, I was. I didn't go into that into the book. One of the many angry reader reviews said, "This doesn't compute, she stayed rich." Of course that didn't happen. Any way I don't want to say I'm poor, because there are a lot of people in this world that don't have enough to eat. We have enough to eat and a place to live, but I'm not in position to pay private school tuition. So that was one part of the decision. But he goes to a wonderful school. I'm thrilled with it, and I wish that I'd sent my daughter there. I like to think that I make my children's educational decisions on the basis of the quality of the school.

CS:
What does the word alcoholic mean to you today?

SC:
I'm realizing more and more that there is no reliable definition of what an alcoholic is and that's one of alcohol's great powers. The minute you say that an alcoholic is a person who drinks in the morning, then you'll find an alcoholic who doesn't. One of the reasons I wrote the book is to say, 'Look I didn't do the conventional alcohol thing, but never-the-less I'm an alcoholic.' Alcohol ruined my life from the inside out, and family's lives and my family's lives for generations. Alcoholism in an incredibly powerful and frightening disease, but it's also unbelievably subtle and cunning. One of the ways it operates is that there's no defining it. In that it's not like any other disease. No one can say who is an alcoholic and who isn't, except that person. Certainly if you can't stop drinking, that's a hint. If you stop drinking and start again a lot of times, that's a hint. There's no hard and fast definition and alcoholism makes hay with that. Both when it comes to diagnosis and when it comes to treatment. One of the reasons I wrote the book and kept it so personal is that I'm not in the position to say that anyone else is an alcoholic. I'm only in the position to say that I am and my alcoholism looked like this. I wanted to tell the story because it doesn't look like the type of alcoholism I grew up thinking was alcoholism.

CS:
How would you compare society today to the age of cocktail parties which you grew with?

SC:
I think alcohol has gone underground. I think are just as many alcoholics. I think that from what I see, and I'm no sociologist, it's as damaging as it ever was. It's just less visible because it's no longer acceptable to drink three martinis, but many people drink three glasses of white wine at lunch. There are a lot of things that used to be acceptable that aren't socially acceptable anymore. Never-the-less, forty percent of traffic fatalities are alcohol-related, and that's just what gets reported. Twenty-five percent of hospital admissions are alcohol related. Fetal alcohol syndrome is the leading cause of mental retardation in the western world. So clearly people haven't stopped drinking. The damage is happening every day. Not only in terms of people getting killed and lives being ruined, but in the terrible emotional toll it takes. So I don't think alcoholism has gone away it's just gone into some kind of weird white wine hiding.

I can't say enough times what a powerful and dreadful thing alcoholism is and how much I wish and how much I hope that people might read my book and just pay a little more attention to it, whether it's in there own lives or the lives of people around them. There is so much blindness to alcoholism that it really frightens me. The way stories are reported, the alcoholism just gets left out. If you look at a story like the Matthew Shepard story, that's an alcohol story. Those three were drunk. It's a dreadful tragic story, but the alcoholism part of it just doesn't get reported. So many of these terrible stories that we live with, that dominate the news are alcohol related. The alcohol part just doesn't get reported. It's so invisible. I hope that my book might make a tiny bit of difference. It might bring a tiny bit of light to this hidden place. Any day in the paper there are three or four stories in the paper that don't get reported as alcohol stories.

In the Matthew Shepard case they were drunk. One of them came from such an alcoholic family that his mother has since died of it. And that's true of so many of these horrible horrible stories. I don't mean to pick on that story, there are so many others, but there are just so many that don't get reported. It wouldn't have happened if they hadn't have been drunk. I read the papers and it's as though there's this other level that nobody mentions. So even though there's a lot of talk about the recovery movement, and even a backlash against it, and snide comments about it. But in fact alcoholism is almost as invisible as it ever was. Do you know what I'm saying?

CS:
Yes, if they'd been on acid it would have been in every story.

SC:
Or if they'd been on pot or anything else. If they'd been eating Hostess Twinkles like the Harvey Milk and Dan White case. It's still invisible. The thing that terrifies me is that there is a backlash against recovery before there's any real recovery. I've had people say to me, 'There are so many books about alcoholism, don't you think there are enough?' Well, there have been three or four in the last ten years.

CS:
The image of alcoholism is seeing the alcoholic as a man and women's alcoholism has been in the shadows.

SC:
Yes, even more than men and as we now know it's much more damaging for women than it is for men. Their livers go faster. I just don't understand why the press and the public just don't want to see it. Because most people aren't alcoholics. It's obvious why alcoholics don't want to see it. The blindness mystifies and scares me because I have kids. They'll be in cars and they'll go to college, and there's this really bad drug out there which everyone thinks is fine. I'm not only scared for my kids in terms of them drinking, that I can do something about, my kids will go out there educated, whether or not that helps, but if you're on the road the other guy might be drunk. The more interviews I give, the more I think about this.

CS:
In your book you talk about the connection between depression and sexual promiscuity. Would you say something about the connection between alcohol and those two elements.

SC:
Alcohol is a major depressant. I used it to combat my depression and then, of course, it depressed me more. I think one reason why there's so much resistance to seeing how destructive it is, is that in the beginning it works wonderfully, like all drugs. People don't take drugs because they want to kill themselves, they take drugs because drugs feel good. It's the same with alcohol, if you're someone who tends to be depressed alcohol relieves that, but of course it's making you more depressed. It is the trickiest. It's a scary, scary adversary.

CS:
Then there is the myth of alcohol as the muse.

SC:
Well, yeah, if you look at the writers who drink and kept drinking you can see pretty clearly their progression into inarticulate, convoluted prose. Again it worked for a while.

CS:
Did it help you at all? As a writer how did you use alcohol?

SC:
I'm not sure. The connection between alcohol and writing is so complicated, but it certainly helped for a while. It helps liberate you. To write a book is a very hard thing . Alcohol liberates you from the fears you might have that might keep you from writing a book. But then, of course, it turns on you and your prose turns to soggy mush. You've seen that happen with a thousand writers. I don't if that happened to my prose, it's possible.

CS:
I don't think so.

SC:
I'm wondering if that happened with Doctors and Women, my fifth novel -- fourth novel, whatever... As a person who doesn't drink, writing is much harder for me.

CS:
How so?

SC:
I like to say what alcohol did for me was that it divorced cause from effect. I was able to write whatever I wanted without thinking that anyone would ever read it. That's much harder to do now; I live in the real world. But I think that I write better and much more on point.

CS:
It also seems now that you've given much more energy to memoir and non-fiction, is that accurate?

SC:
Yes, although that also has to do with being a single mother and having two children.

CS:
What's that connection?

SC:
I don't want to sound like this is bad, it's not bad. When you're a single mother of two small children, and now they're getting bigger, but, your life is basically a series of twenty minute fragments, or half hour fragments. An hour fragment is a big one. I can't write fiction that way, but I've been able to write non-fiction that way.

CS:
How do write? What's your routine?

SC:
The way I write now is I just keep the computer on and I just write whenever I can. Sometimes it's between ten and eleven at night. Sometimes it's between nine and ten in the morning. The kids come first and then the writing. Or just the basics, the grocery shopping and then the writing and everything else.

Yesterday was a typical day, my sixteen year old got up at six in the morning, she had a homework crisis. I got up with her. I tried to help her with her homework crisis. She went off to school. I got my nine year old up made sure he got dressed. Dealt with his puppy. Made sure he brushed his teeth and then took him to school. Then hung around for a wonderful ten minutes with the wonderful third grade parents. Then I came home, by this time it's about nine-thirty. I had an interview then sat down and wrote for about ten minutes writing a book review. Then the phone rang and it's my son saying he's sick at school and can I come get him. Then I went and got him. You know like that.

CS:
In your book you don't mention your mother until the end. Do you see your mother in yourself these days?

SC:
I do and I don't. My mother's situation was so different. It was my great privilege to be able to support and raise my children by myself. Only because the world has changed as much as it has that I've been able to do that. She wasn't able to do that. She was in a very different position. She didn't work when we were young. She never worked much. I think I can say this about my generation I feel sorry for my mother and she feels sorry for me. She had a very leisurely life compared to mine. She could actually get her hair done once a week and go clothes shopping and go the movies and do all the kinds of stuff I don't do. On the other hand, it's a tremendous privilege to be able to write and to publish and to be able to write to some extent what I want to write. I wouldn't give that up for all the manicures in the world. But I never get enough sleep. I never cook. All the stuff that she was able to spend her life doing, I just don't get to do.

CS:
What do you say to people who make comparisons between your writing and your father's writing?

SC:
My father was an extraordinary writer. I feel that I've staked out a very different territory from his territory. This is clearly one of the appeals of non-fiction for me. He wasn't very interested in the interior lives of women, and that's my subject. He didn't write non-fiction, and I do. His prose style was very different from mine. That said, I learned a huge amount from him as a writer. Not only in terms of prose style, but mostly in terms of what we're talking about, which is, what a writer's life is like. It was my father who said to me, "A writer's life is an improvisation." So I feel okay about the fact that I'll go to third grade international night, and then run to the National Book Awards. Often, my life seems very ... weird. It's an improvisation. Also, I saw my father write for money very directly, as I do. And I saw that when he felt that he had to turn a story in too soon, or write a story on demand, and he felt terrible about it, often those were good stories. So I learned how to make a living as a writer from watching him do it. I learned that it's okay to write a story for money; that sometimes that's going to be your best work even though it doesn't feel so good. I learned a lot of stuff like that which was invaluable. I learned that it's okay to write whenever you can in the interstices. I learned that it's okay to put your family first, as he did. I don't think he did emotionally, but when there was a family crisis, he was there. He did not lock himself in a room and isolate himself. He never had a real study (he would write in a guest room, or in a tent or a bedroom), and neither do I. I learned that from him. Right now I am writing in a corner of my bedroom. When the kids have the TV on, which is also in the bedroom, then I'll take the laptop into the living room. Sometimes I'll just go to a restaurant. I learned from him, that that's okay. If it weren't for him, I might have thought that I had to have some kind of provision that I don't have.

CS:
In the book, you also talk about Robert [one of the three primary husbands/partners written about in the book] teaching you about writing and editing.

SC:
They all did. If I had wanted to choose the three men who would have been the best writing teachers for me in the world, it would have been those three men. That's not why I chose them, but they're each extraordinary writers and extraordinary editors. They each were incredibly generous in terms of teaching me everything they knew. Incredibly patient. They each represented a very different kind of writing and editing. That is not why I chose them, in fact at the time I was sure that I would never be a writer. I had vowed that I would never be a writer, because ... who needed it?! And I sometimes still feel that way. (laughs) If I had set out to be a writer, I couldn't have chosen three better teachers.

CS:
Will we see any novels from you in the future?

SC:
I would love to write fiction again, but I'm not sure I could do it until my kids are older. My kids still need me. A sixteen-year old is making life decisions.

CS:
Are you reviewing your life as a sixteen-year-old now, as the parent of a sixteen-year-old?

SC:
As I say in the book:It wasn't that I had a miserable childhood, it was that I was a miserable child. I was seriously depressed. I was miserable, out of it, rebellious, couldn't stay in school, couldn't keep myself from saying exactly the thing that no one wanted to hear. That may still be true. (laughs) But I would say, now when I say the thing that no one wants to hear, at least it's a true thing. When I was sixteen, I think it was just the thing that no one wanted to hear. I was a disaster as a child. I'm somebody who just loves getting older. And that's because with every year I'm further away from my disastrous childhood (laughs) and my disastrous young adulthood, which I now know was disastrous because of alcohol. I didn't know that then. My disastrous thirties! To find out that alcohol was the problem was a tremendous relief. When I stopped drinking, I stopped acting that way.

CS:
At the end of the book, you talk about God.

SC:
It's hard to talk about God, because is beyond description. I love God and I see God working in my life, but I wouldn't presume to prescribe God for anyone else. I think the God whom I love is beyond description, beyond words. Neither male nor female. Neither human or non-human. The God whom I love is literally the God who I can't understand, don't need to understand. Some days I fall away from it. For me faith is a journey. It's a struggle towards God. It's not like, I got it, it's done; I have it every day. Faith is also intensely personal. I think everyone has their own God and how they want to connect with that God is none of my business.

CS:
Do you talk to your friends about faith?

SC:
No. Not unless they want to. I certainly don't proselytize to them. They would shoot me. (laughs) I hope I don't preach. It's the same with alcoholism. I think alcohol is an evil substance, but I'm very aware that most people can drink it without ill effect. I'm not in a position to say that people shouldn't drink. All I'm in a position to say is that I wish people would pay attention. So that if there are people who shouldn't drink they might notice that. It's the same with God. I'm not in the position to say that everyone should love God. I happen to be Christian which is a fairly radical thing to be in our messed up world. That has another whole raft of problems attendant on it. I just do my best with it.
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