That's not exactly when his abuse began, but it definitely affected his life. For a long period of time, Cheever did his best to hide his problems and keep them secret. He worried about what would happen if people found out about his struggle, and he had finally had enough. Samuel Coale wrote about John Cheever's struggle with alcohol in his book "John Cheever." He recorded that “he (Cheever) was fighting a losing battle with severe and chronic alcoholism” so he decided to go “for a month to Smithers, an alcoholic rehabilitation center in New York City” (Coale 8). During this period he no longer bothered to keep his struggle a secret and admitted and denounced his alcoholism in many interviews. After spending a month at Smithers, Cheever remained a fully rehabilitated man. He felt like he had let down the people he cared about and wished he no longer had to bear the burden of his secret, and both of these feelings he attributed to his recovery. Both of these reasons were the expressed motivations for his recovery. The biggest unspoken motivation for him was probably his near-death experience with a heart attack around this time. Cheever struggled but eventually sustained and overcame his drinking