Home Before Dark

"I have been a storyteller since the beginning of my life, rearranging facts in order to make them more interesting and sometimes more significant," John Cheever wrote in his private journal in 1961. "I have turned my eccentric old mother into a woman of wealth and position and made my father a captain at sea. I have improvised a background for myself--genteel, traditional--and it is generally accepted."

Susan Cheever gives us a moving chronicle of her father's successes and failures, his fight with alcoholism, his literary triumphs of the 1970s, the doubts and fears of his last years and finally the struggle with cancer that was his last.