life in the closet
been reading about john cheever, the brilliant writer who lived the life inside a closet, got married, had children, but remained lonely, depressed and found solace in alcohol and younger men. "The journals contain some of the best sentences Cheever ever wrote, but, my God, they are horrifying. The pain, the loneliness, the secrecy, the shame: Cheever, an imposter in his own life, turned self-loathing into an art form. His image as the poet of suburbia – the Ovid of Ossining, Time magazine called him – was thus dealt a possibly mortal blow, the moments of darkness in his stories now taking on new menace; the moments of grace, a sudden emptiness. Was ever a man's outward appearance so at odds with his inward condition? His friend John Updike thought not, and shook his head sadly at this psychic chasm, hoping against hope that Cheever's fiction, with its startling glimmers of optimism, its sense always of moving towards the light, would somehow prevail. "Now, ne...