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from: Susan Cheever

Literary Heaven

Posted Monday, Nov. 9, 1998, at 6:09 PM ET

Don't you think we should save some of our disagreements, say the one about whether or not middle-class white men are dreadfully oppressed and unjustly condemned by a new class of women with huge expectations and tiny little hearts?

Or the one about whether drinking is a good thing as it obviously was for Yeats. Actually, I'm glad you brought it up, drinking that is, because by a strange coincidence that's what my book--coming out in January and called Note Found in a Bottle--is about. What's weird for me though is that when interviewers have asked me to define alcoholism, I find that I can't. There are as many kinds of alcoholism as there are alcoholics is what I tell them, which is not the kind of answer they're looking for. That's why the only way I could write a book about drinking is to tell the story of my drinking.

Don't you have a book coming out too?

As for Solzhenitsyn, I was there when Harvard gave him the snood. The sky opened and rain cascaded down onto the common, the stage, the Widener library and the extremely distinguished company. Actually our father was getting his degree at the same time, which was why I was there. We all got wet and there were no cabs to be had and so the three of us, dripping wet with Daddy carrying his honorary degree under his arm, took the MTA to the Ritz for dinner. I was wearing this nifty white linen suit. It was one of the times I was proud to be their daughter.

I'm off to a cocktail party to celebrate the newly formed Woodhull Institute for Ethical leadership. So the next time you make one of your pronouncements about good and evil, perhaps you will want to ask yourself, what would Victoria Woodhull do? Or W.W.V.W.D?

I'll log on again tonight, but early tomorrow I'm off to another wild event, a breakfast meeting of the Author's Guild Council. My breakfast table conversation may be exhausted by the time I get home! So if there's any delay in my response, you'll know that's because I'm working hard to get myself into literary heaven--which is probably a lot like normal people's hell.

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718192021
from: Susan Cheever

Literary Heaven

Posted Monday, Nov. 9, 1998, at 6:09 PM ET
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Benjamin Cheever is a novelist and author of the forthcoming Famous After Death. Susan Cheever is a teacher, columnist, and writer. Her memoir, Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker, is forthcoming. They are siblings.
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