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Summary
Summary
Having children transforms us -- by the amazing power of our love for them and theirs for us, by the anger they are able to evoke in us, and because in order to be good parents to our children, we must admit we are no longer children ourselves. In "As Good as I Could Be," bestselling author Susan Cheever describes that transformation in passionate, compelling, moving prose.
Susan is raising a daughter, 18, and a son, 11; they have all survived divorce, blending families, issues at school, eating disorders, and alcoholism. They have negotiated the rocky shoals of adolescence and the teenage years with their love and respect for each other intact. Cheever describes her children as smart, kind, and connected; "As Good as I Could Be" is the story of how that happened.
Cheever reveals the challenges, the joys, and the heartbreaks of being a parent. Using the domestic details of her family's life, she illuminates larger truths, starting with the most basic: in order to raise happy, stable, successful children, parents can't be afraid to use their authority -- financial, emotional, and experiential; a family is not -- and should not
Author Notes
Susan Cheever, the daughter of the great American writer John Cheever, is the author of nine previous books, including Home Before Dark, a best-selling memoir about her father, & the novel Looking for Work. She has written award-winning articles on parenting for New York Newsday & is a contributing writer to Architectural Digest. She teaches writing at Bennington College & Yale University & lives in New York.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Those who look to Cheever's memoirs (Home Before Dark; Note Found in a Bottle) for insights into her father, writer John Cheever, will find this book disappointing. This parenting guide-cum-memoir, based on her weekly New York Newsday columns, focuses instead on her life as a single mom bringing up two good kids her son, James, and daughter, Liley (age 10 and 18, respectively, when she completed the book) despite divorces from each of their fathers, alcoholism and a host of other problems. Cheever's honest, realistic approach to the difficulties of parenting is refreshing, as is her optimistic belief that people can be good parents despite their own unhappy childhoods. At times the book is repetitive (too many descriptions of how great her kids are). While many of her suggestions are sensible it's important to listen to our children others fall short of the mark. She denigrates the value of therapy for children, for instance, despite her own kids' problems (her son is depressed and her daughter has an eating disorder). Working parents who don't have the luxury of flex time may disagree with her blanket rejection of quality time in favor of spending more time with kids. Some essays, like the one on not worrying about what college your child gets into, seem condescending given that Liley is a freshman at Princeton. As a parenting guide, Cheever's is woefully incomplete, but at its best, it is pleasurable, not unlike whiling away a few hours with an encouraging friend, albeit one who brags too much about her kids. Forecast: Cheever's previous books have sold well and have won her name recognition. This one may attract a literary readership intrigued and perhaps impressed by the fact that someone from such a famously dysfunctional family has written a parenting guide. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Another of the author's literate explorations of life and death in the town of Sturrenden and environs, where Inspector Luke Thanet and his faithful Sergeant Lineham bear the brunt of infrequent murder investigations (Once Too Often, 1998, etc.). The victim now is Virginia Mintaur'wife of lawyer Ralph, mother of Caroline and Rachel'whose body has been found at the bottom of the decorative well adorning her prized garden. Virginia had disappeared the previous evening while entertaining neighbors Howard and Marilyn Squires; Rachel and tennis coach Matthew Agon, who have just announced their engagement; and Virginia's sister Jane and her boyfriend Arnold Prime. When the postmortem indicates murder, Thanet probes for means and motives. The latter abound as Virginia's many extramarital beaux come to light, among them Squires and Agon, with Prime clearly next in line. There's no love lost, either, between Virginia and Ralph's mother, an acerbic globetrotter who lives in an annex of the Mintaur house. Is there some connection to Caroline's elopement four years ago with the gardener's son Dick Swain, whose witchlike mother still lives nearby'the couple unheard from all this time? Malice and mischief, past and present, provide a wealth of motives until Thanet, besieged by family worries of his own, manages to solve more puzzles than one. Straightforward and absorbing, deftly written and adroitly plotted: another quiet winner for Simpson.
Library Journal Review
Noted author and mother Cheever (daughter of the great American writer John Cheever) reflects on the importance of motherhood and tells us what having children has meant in her own life. Although not a how-to manual for raising children, Cheever's memoir will encourage readers in their efforts to follow their own paths in parenting. Cheever talks about her mistakes (e.g., she battled alcoholism for many years, recounted in Note Found in a Bottle, which led to her daughter's health problems) and how she corrects them; she also analyzes her successes, which she attributes to establishing authority in the parent-child relationship. This sense of authority, which is at the core of Cheever's philosophy on parenting, is not absolute and autocratic but rather comes from the belief that parents must leave their childhood behind and become adults in their relationships with their children. This sensitive and touching narrative will appeal to a broad range of readers. Recommended for most libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/01.] Kay Brodie, Chesapeake Coll., Wye Mills, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.