InsideOut Interview: Susan Cheever

by Owen Lipstein January/February 2009



Best-selling author and daughter of Pulitzer Prize winner John Cheever, Susan Cheever just published a book that makes her kids want to hide. Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction (Simon & Schuster, 2008) is a memoir-style ride through the addictive qualities of falling in love, the encouragement we get from society to maintain this popular addiction, and the shame that ultimately plagues us even though most of us are doing it.


Susan Cheever is the author of five novels and eight works of non-fiction, including Home Before Dark (Simon & Schuster, 1999), a memoir about her father; American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (Simon & Schuster, 2006); and My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson—His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous (Simon & Schuster, 2004), the book that brought the subject of sex addiction to her attention.



Owen Lipstein: I’m chuckling over your book, Desire.



Susan Cheever: That’s good, chuckling is good.



OL: Have you heard that response, that it’s actually quite funny?



SC: It’s meant to be funny.



OL: Well, it was. You start the book by saying, “My children suggested I dedicate my book ‘To my children—who died of embarrassment.’” Tell us about the process of writing a book where that kind of request is made.



SC: Well, it’s a book about sex addiction, or love addiction—the kind of addiction where other people are your substance—as opposed to the kind of addiction where alcohol or drugs or certain behavior is your substance. And what interested me about this kind of desire, as I call it, is that it’s the only addiction which is applauded in our culture. I’ve been married three times: People congratulate me for that.



OL: Congratulations.



SC: Yeah, thanks. [Laughter] To fall in love is a very good thing in our culture. When I go to buy a car, my friends are like, “What kind of car is it? What does Consumer Reports say? Are you gonna research?” They’re very rational.
But if I say to my friends, “Oh, I’ve fallen in love, he’s 20 years younger than I am, he’s never been able to hold a job”—they say, “Oh, that’s wonderful!” We don’t ask questions; we tend to think it’s wonderful no matter what the circumstances.
If you’re maxed out on your credit cards, or if you’re falling down at parties and groping the wrong people, if you’re spending all your Christmas money on cocaine, we don’t approve of that.
But if you’re falling in love once a year or once every two years, we do approve of that. So, on the one hand, it’s the only addiction that we applaud and smile about. On the other hand, there’s more shame around sex addiction than around any other addiction, as far as I can tell.
It’s this paradoxical weirdness. We’re puritanical love junkies: We love it and hate it. And because of the shame around this subject, I found that I was hiding my research when people came over to visit. My children made me promise that I wouldn’t publish
the book until they were both out of the house living elsewhere. I wasn’t allowed to publicize it ’til my son went off to college and my daughter was already living in another city.
Falling in love is such a dazzling and fabulous experience that it automatically removes your rational mind. And then on top of that, we have this tremendous shame. If you call falling in love every two years sex addiction, then it’s tremendously shameful. But if you don’t call it sex addiction, then it’s tremendously wonderful. I think my children’s reaction is to the shame. It’s a very strong reaction, and it makes people laugh, because they identify. You know, they too feel that they would die of embarrassment if their mother wrote a book about sex addiction.



OL: I’m thinking of Hamlet and Gertrude.



SC: My son is not Hamlet, nor am I Gertrude.



OL: Oh no, I’m not accusing you of being a murderer. It’s just that Hamlet couldn’t handle the fact that his mother was a sexual being.



SC: Well, John Updike wrote that book. It’s called Gertrude and Claudius. But that is not my story. As embarrassed as my children are, my involvement with their fathers is above reproach, as I’m sure they’d agree.



OL: In terms of the subject of sex addiction and shame, you had a very interesting chapter on the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Tell us a little bit about him.



SC: I wrote a biography of Bill Wilson. I think he was a great man, an inspired man. But he was an extremely human man. For instance, he not only stopped drinking, but by codifying the ways in which he stopped drinking, [he] started a movement which is really the only successful weapon we have against addiction in this country. He continued to smoke, and famously, he asked for a drink on his deathbed. So, he was very human in that way. I don’t want to call it flawed, because I think to be human is to be human.
But one of the things about Bill Wilson is he met his wife when he was 18. He was in terrible shape when he met her, yet they stayed married his entire life: It was a 53-year marriage. One of the things that happened in the marriage was that for whatever reason—and we don’t know [what it was], because these letters either have been destroyed or don’t exist—he and his wife stopped having a sexual relationship. He began having sexual relationships outside. As the old-timers say, “He stepped off the reservation.”
When I was on tour for the biography of Bill Wilson, the question I was asked most often was, “Was Bill Wilson a sex addict?” In fact, that was one of my first exposures to the idea of sex addiction. In my biography of him, I didn’t draw a conclusion, but when I went to write about sex addiction, of course, this question came back up.
Nobody can make a judgment for another person about whether or not they’re an addict. Addiction is an inside job: A person has to make the judgment for themselves. Other people can try to tell you, and they will…



OL: Yes, they will.



SC: But really, they don’t know. So without making a judgment about Bill Wilson, I went a little further into this question of whether or not he was a sex addict. And it led me to one of the most interesting conclusions in [Desire], which is that addiction is not tied to substance. In other words, if you’re an alcoholic, it’s very likely that you can also quite easily be addicted to at least three or four other substances.



OL: Cigarettes or bodies?



SC: Cigarettes, bodies, food, money. Gambling. Drugs. Substances that have a physical embodiment and behaviors that act as substances. Sex addiction is both a behavior and it has a substance: other people. So, I came to see Bill Wilson as an addict, rather than somebody who I wanted to ally with a particular substance. The fact that he died of emphysema because he couldn’t stop smoking certainly tells you that although he had stopped drinking, he was still an addict.



OL: You talk about the three stages of love, the first one having very little to do with marriage. Now that you’ve written the book, what can you tell us about what you’ve learned—never mind your own three marriages—about that first stage?

SC: Well, what I learned (and what I wrote the book to teach others, because if I had known then what I know now, as everybody’s always saying, I might not have had three marriages)—is that falling in love, as we know it, is this wonderful, transformative, electrifying experience, that most of us have at least once. The brain chemistry is exactly like addiction: It includes obsession, an addictive trance [and] a lot of broken promises—[and,] like all addictive experiences, it has a time limit. It’ll only last 18 months.



OL: Not even a thousand days? Isn’t there a theory that there’s a natural ending at the end of something like three years?

SC: Well, I would say it’s shorter. But the point is, it ends. That obsession, that electricity, will not last. We live in a culture that says, “Fall in love, feel that this person is the one, marry them, have children.” [But] the thing I discovered is that [only] very occasionally is falling in love connected to that other kind of love which enables you to partner with another person through life.
So, my message is: Do not get married, don’t have children. Wait it out and see how you feel about this person when you’re on the other side of it, when this person becomes just another human being who you see clearly, without the kind of addictive fireworks that go off in our heads when we’re falling in love. And then figure out if you can possibly have with this person that calmer kind of “attachment love,” as Helen Fisher calls it.
But that’s really my message: Enjoy falling in love, have a great time… Do not merge your libraries.



OL: You talk about cats and dogs in the book. Tell us about that.



SC: There are so many interesting ways to talk about couples, right? One of them is to ask: “Are you the cat or are you the dog?” Remember Thornton Wilder, in The Bridge Over the River Kwai, where he says “one always loves the more and one always loves the less”? It’s really the same thing. The dog is the one who loves the more, of course, because dogs can’t get enough of you. With a cat, it’s a thrill if the cat shows you any signs of affection at all.
[This is] a metaphor for the way some people behave. I do think that in this falling-in-love state there is a kind of power balance. After a year-and-a-half, or a thousand days, or when[ever] it ends, when the dopamine rush is past and the falling in love is over, [it’s] interesting to see where that power balance ends. In attachment love, there really isn’t so much of a power balance. It’s about two people going forward together in relationship to the world, whereas falling in love is two people entirely in relation to each other.



OL: I was listening to your book American Bloomsbury. Besides being a community of geniuses—was that a community of addictions?



SC: That’s such a good question. I think that was a community in which many people fell in and out of love with each other, but there were many obstacles. Death is the ultimate obstacle, right? So when Margaret Fuller—the principle sexual focus in that community—died, her memory became so powerful that Henry James called it the “Margaret Ghost.” If you fall in love with someone and you’re addicted to them and they die, you never get over it.
But I think that Louisa May Alcott had had these terrific crushes on both Thoreau and Emerson. And Emerson sort of had a crush on Alcott, and Thoreau on Emerson. I think that all those falling-in-love experiences did resolve into a kind of wonderful community of attachment.



OL: Maybe we should all go back to Concord, where life is
much harder.



SC: Well, it’s harder physically. But when you look at Emerson, you can see that he knew exactly what he was doing. He fell totally, hopelessly in love with [his first wife], and it was excruciatingly painful because she was sick and then she died. Instead of waiting to fall in love [again], he selected an extremely competent woman with a little bit of money of her own, who adored him, and married her. He started with partner love, and that actually worked out very well. Nothing’s perfect, but Emerson clearly was emotionally way ahead of most of us.



OL: You’ve written on a wide variety of subjects. You even wrote about your father before daughters were writing about famous fathers. What are you working on now?



SC: I’m writing a biography of Louisa May Alcott. People say, “How can you write about sex addiction and then write about Louisa May Alcott?!” My obsessive theme is how to be a woman in this world—that’s what I’m trying to figure out through my writing. Alcott had to choose between a career and a family, between using her sexual currency to capture the right kind of man, or trying to make it [on her own]. All the problems that we have today, she had in spades, and she made certain choices in relation to those problems.
In a way, Desire is also about how to be a woman in this culture. It’s about men as well, but women are told, “Fall in love, get married, have children.” And really, that’s the wrong advice. We should be saying to them, “Fall in love, do not get married and have children.” And so in a way, the books, although they appear to be opposites, have the same subject. Which is also true of American Bloomsbury.



OL: How has the reaction to Desire been, compared to, say, American Bloomsbury?



SC: Reactions to books are so weird. American Bloomsbury could not get arrested in New York City, whereas in Boston, it was on the bestseller list for three months. This book has been kind of the opposite. It’s as if literature comes from Concord and sex comes from New York. Desire has had a tremendous amount of attention in New York, [while] there’s far less interest in Boston… than there was about American Bloomsbury. When I had my conversation with the Simon & Schuster people about this book, they said, “Oh, it’s a Susan Cheever audience.” Clearly it’s not. Clearly people buy books by subject.



OL: I found Desire to be a delightful book. And I didn’t mean to call you Gertrude. Sons just don’t like to imagine their mothers having sex.



SC: Right, but let me say, my children are very vocal about not wanting me to have sex. And I’ve completely accommodated them. Unlike Gertrude.

I’m glad you liked the book, and I’m glad it made you laugh, because I think almost everything on Earth is funny.



OL: And our pathetic relationships—if they don’t make us laugh, we’re all in trouble, right?



SC: Exactly.