Susan Cheever

Susan Cheever, (born July 31, 1943 in New York City), daughter of John Cheever and sister of Benjamin Cheever, is an author whose books include My Name is Bill - Bill Wilson: His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous, a biography of Alcoholics Anonymous cofounder Bill Wilson; Home Before Dark, a memoir about her father, John Cheever; Note Found in a Bottle (a memoir of her own alcoholism and recovery); Treetops: A Memoir; and five novels: Looking for Work, A Handsome Man, The Cage, Doctors and Women, and Elizabaeth Cole. Her essay "Baby Battle," in which she describes immersion in early motherhood and subsequent phases of letting go of her primary identity as a mother, was included in the 2006 anthology Mommy Wars by Washington Post writer Leslie Morgan Steiner Leslie Morgan Steiner. Cheever's most recent book is American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work, published in December 2006. She is currently working on a book about sexual addiction. Cheever was a Guggenheim Fellow, 1983. She graduated from Brown University in 1965. She is also a member of the Corporation of Yaddo and serves on the Author's Guild Council. In addition to working on her books, she teaches in the Bennington College M.F.A. program and at The New School.