Inside story ...

... Cheever on Cheever. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

My favorite part of my father’s life was the last decade. As a sober man he became the father of my dreams. He was miraculously loving, and considerate and also doing the best writing of his career. But my favorite part of the biography is the beginning, both in Bailey’s deconstruction of my father’s background, the combination of distinction and disaster that has always been the Cheever story, and his summing up of the man my father was: reticent and candid, lonely and gregarious.