ABSTRACT
Critics reviewing Cheever's Journals have understood this achievement as autobiographical, describing the Journals, as authors have seen, as "an intimate self-portrait" or "brutally honest autobiography." Fothergill's evaluation of the diary as a genre with literary potential is made on the basis of his reading of the diary as "serial autobiography," and he selected for his study only those diaries "whose prime subject is the life of the writer, valued for its own sake," foregrounding "the individual consciousness," and amounting to, in his own concluding words, a "book of the self." The world or "worlds" the diarist writes about is equally a construction, made up and made over in every entry. Cheever gives each day its own "shapely" form, in a search for "truth and beauty".
