‘Easiest Road to the Human Heart’

Not too long ago, Susan Cheever stood in front of an audience and read from her latest memoir, “Note Found in a Bottle” (Simon & Schuster). It is about her recovery from alcoholism. After she finished, a woman came up to her and said, “I’m exactly in the situation you were in.” Then her voice broke, and she had to walk away.

“That’s why I write,” Cheever says now, with tears in her eyes. She sits on the edge of a chair in her Manhattan apartment. Bookshelves line her walls. As she speaks, she gestures, grabbing at the air as if trying to capture her words and place them exactly where she wants them. The highest aim of art, she says, “is to make someone feel less alone in their situation.”

“Note Found in a Bottle” is Cheever’s third memoir. “Home Before Dark” (Houghton Mifflin, 1984) is about life with her father, John Cheever, the Pulitzer-winning fiction writer, and “Treetops” (Bantam, 1991) is about life with her mother, Helen. As if Cheever is parceling out her life, her latest effort is about herself, and she says that her self-portrait could not be separated from her struggle with drinking.

Alcoholism is a cultural problem, she says. It is woven seamlessly into the daily lives of many people from all economic classes.

“All that time I was growing up,” she writes, “drinking seemed as much a part of life, as ordinary a part of life, as eating or even breathing. . . . We laughed while alcohol twined itself around us like a choking, deadly, invisible vine.”

You have to look closely, Cheever warns, because alcoholism is a chameleon.

“It can blend into the landscape. It can hide. That it was hidden from me for so long is not a surprise. The surprise is that I ever saw it.”

Cheever never drank so much that she couldn’t stand up. Nor was she ever put in jail. She didn’t crash her car, nor did she go broke. But her memoir describes a troubled and manipulative woman searching for escape through promiscuity, impulsive traveling and daily drinking. Very often, she felt helpless and isolated. She neglected her children. She neglected her health. She went to a therapist who sexually molested her, but she kept seeing him. She fought with her husbands.

“Our anger combined with our drinking created an atmosphere that was more poisonous than the sum of its parts,” she writes in her memoir. “I once threw a pie plate at Robert’s head. He often grabbed me by the shoulders and slammed me against the paneling until my bones made cracking sounds. We chased each other back and forth down the corridors and through the rooms of the great house. When we came, panting, to a stop, we would start over again.”

Cheever was greedily searching for something to fill an inner void she couldn’t define. Martinis, beer, wine and champagne gave her only fleeting relief.

“Alcohol divorced cause and effect for me,” she says, raising both of her hands as if one held “cause” and the other “effect.” “I thought I could not pay my bills and somehow not get in trouble. I thought I could hurt other people and somehow they’d like me anyway. I thought I could misbehave at work and somehow get promoted. I created the odds and then worked against them.”

In 1982, her newborn daughter shattered these beliefs. For the first time, Cheever felt love for someone besides herself, and with that love came the desire to take responsibility for her actions.

“The feelings I had then were more powerful than anything I had ever felt, and they were instantaneous,” she writes. “They transcended the pain and sweetness of my life before that moment, and they soared above the exhilaration of the perfect flute of champagne or the comfort of a martini shimmering in its glass at the end of a long, dry day.”

No Quick Cure for Alcoholism

But her victory over alcoholism was not as sudden and miraculous. She faltered several times.

“The nature of humanness is that you progress in fits and starts,” she says.

She had to witness her father change after he stopped drinking seven years before his death in 1982.

“He became this loving, amazing, intelligent man,” she says. “Someone who was engaged with the world. Someone who wanted to learn to work the dishwasher. Someone who was capable of tremendously sweet gestures, and was reliable. He [also] wrote his best book.”

But what Cheever needed most was faith that “a benevolent force . . . [existed] in the universe.” She describes her faith in God as idiosyncratic and progressive.

“It’s not something that I have,” she says. “It’s something that I aspire to. Faith is a journey, not a destination.”

Once she began to pray for the ability to stop drinking for just a minute, she found that she could. Thus, to this day, she lives her life and undergoes her spiritual journey minute by minute.

She wrote the book to tell this to those who might be like her. She admits that her motive was messianic and believes that, despite criticism that she has written yet another memoir, the genre was the appropriate venue for her message. Memoir offers authenticity and immediacy, she says. “If you have a message the way I do, you want to be direct.”

Joyce Carol Oates once called biographies that focused on the problems of famous people pathographies. Writer James Atlas suggested that our current literary climate could be called autopathographies. In a culture in which the private has never been more public, both accomplished and novice writers are pulling their skeletons out of their closets and laying them on the page, bone by excruciating bone.

Some critics wonder whether readers seek in these literary confessions voyeuristic pleasure or vicarious therapy. But others have claimed that autobiographical stories are succeeding where institutions--schools, governments and religions--are failing. A few say that the success of the memoir is not unique, that, in fact, the genre fits within the Emersonian and Whitmanesque strain of the American literary tradition: self-exploratory writing that is supposed to be universal.

Cheever believes that a current backlash against the prevalence of memoirs is misogynistic. She says that the memoir is a woman’s genre, and that the backlash is an effort to silence women. Women have written a disproportionate number of memoirs, and most of them have been controversial, she says.

“The memoirs that everyone becomes so exercised about are the ones about affairs with powerful men, childbirth and motherhood. . . . [These are] the stories that women used to tell themselves while making a pot of coffee or in the ladies’ room or walking their kids. Women have been silent about their private lives. Now they are telling their stories, and that’s very disturbing to some people.”

Diana Fuss, associate professor of English and feminist theory at Princeton University who has done work on the memoir, agrees that a greater number of memoirs published today are written by women. The genre offers a comfortable space in which women can tell their tales, Fuss says, adding that the memoir as a genre has been traditionally considered “feminine,” no matter the sex of the writer.

Memoir Blamed for Novel’s Decline

“People believe that the memoir is too sentimentalizing, too self-revealing, too exhibitionist, and those qualities connote femininity,” Fuss says. Fuss agrees there is now a backlash against the memoir and believes the genre is being offered up as a scapegoat for the decline of the novel. In postwar America, the novel has been considered masculine, Fuss says, and “the rise of the memoir is being blamed for the fall of the formerly robust novel. In effect, the memoir is charged with castrating the American novel,” Fuss says.

Most women choose this genre, Cheever says, because it is the most accessible.

“The easiest road to the human heart is just to sit down and tell your story straight,” she says. Moreover, the memoir is a personal genre, she says, and most women want to tell their own tales; it’s therapeutic.

Cheever leads a simple life now. Most of the time she is content and thankful. Over a recent weekend, she helped her 9-year-old son construct a scaffolding twice his size with multicolored sticks. She is warm and smiles often. A vase filled with blossoming yellow tulips greets those who walk through her door.

Writing “Note Found in a Bottle” was a difficult process of discovery for her, Cheever says. Each word she wrote not only gave her a clearer picture of how much alcohol controlled her life but also took her farther from that life. The reward for her work is bittersweet. She says the reward comes in the form of that woman who came up to her--choked up--after her reading.