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May 14, 2026
What does it mean to grow up inside a story — especially when the person telling it is your parent? Susan Cheever and Molly Jong-Fast come together for a candid, searching conversation about literary inheritance: the blessings, burdens, and complicated intimacies of being raised by writers whose work helped define their eras.
Cheever’s new book, When All the Men Wore Hats, revisits the stories of her father, Pulitzer Prize winner John Cheever — “the Chekhov of suburbia” (Julian Barnes). Looking back on her father’s work, seeking to understand the connections between his art and her own life, Cheever traces how a bit of local gossip, a slice of Greek myth, and a new translation of Madame Bovary resulted in classic short stories like “The Country Husband” and “The Swimmer.” Jong-Fast’s How to Lose Your Mother tells the story of her intense relationship with her famous mother, the firebrand writer Erica Jong — a story of loss and a singular woman’s literary life. By turns searching, funny, angry, and wise, these books offer a rare and candid look at how writers shape the lives of their writer children — and how these children reshape their own destinies.
Hear Cheever and Jong-Fast in a special conversation about stepping out of the shadow of a literary lineage: an exploration about what we inherit — talent, ambition, mythologies — and what we choose to revise.
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