Product Description
Self-Consciousness

One of our finest novelists now gives us his most dazzling creation -- his own life. In six eloquent and compelling chapters, the author of The Witches of Eastwick and the wonderful Rabbit trilogy gives us an incitingly honest look at the makings of an American writer -- and of an American man.

Here is Updike on his childhood, on ailments both horrible (psoriasis) and hilarious (his experiences at the hands of a dentist), on his stuttering, on his feelings during the Vietnam War, on his genealogy. and on that most elusive of subjects, his innermost self. What emerges is a fascinating, fully formed portrait -- candid, often very, funny, and always illuminating.

John Updike

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 6 reviews)

Memoirs

After reading this I'm surprised Mr. Updike isn't covered with skin cancer.

I've enjoyed most all of Mr. Updike's fictional works. This is my first of his non-fiction. Recommended.
July 30, 2007

A Brilliant Homecoming

This is a beautiful book. From its extraordinary opening, as Updike returns to his childhood home, to its lucid and moving discourse "On Being a Self Forever," this book stands as one of Updike's most brilliant achievements. The memoir is structured, not as a chronological narrative of his life, but as a series of meditations on phases of his experience where Updike's search for the core of his own identity keeps criss-crossing with his search for a settled sense of meaning in the modern world. The writing is subtle, ironic, self-deprecating, utterly honest and luminous. The book itself is best seen, I think, as a worthy successor to a long line of works beginning, perhaps,with Wordsworth's The Prelude while it echoes the confessional voices of Augustine, on the one hand, and Robert Lowell on the other.
March 27, 2004

Wonderful evocation of formative years

John Updike is arguably, with Saul Bellow, the greatest of living authors writing in English. This volume exemplifies his strengths. His evocation of growing up in middle-America is often quite beautiful. Yet this book is not a memoir in the conventional sense of a chronological account, but more of series of scenes and reflections from a full and satisfying life. Updike's moving account of his struggle with psoriasis and his marital difficulties is personal without degenerating into the narcissism of so much second-rate autobiography, even if he pays slightly more attention to his rakish period in the 1970s than we might strictly wish to know.

Updike writes poignantly but with resolution of his lonely status as a liberal writer in the 1960s who did not lose his ideals as a liberal Democrat, in the traditional sense of that term, and thus who abjured the descent into extremism and anti-anti-Communism of many of his contemporaries. To have believed that the Vietnam War was imprudent and prosecuted by morally dubious means, yet known the noble cause that was at stake in it - namely, preventing a country from falling to a ferocious Communist tyranny - won Updike few friends and lost him many, yet his stance was an honourable and principled one.

The final chapter of the book is, for me, the best. Updike writes particularly well of his liberal religious faith, which almost amounts to fideism. One can admire his honest wrestling with such questions without sharing his conclusions, and admire even more the quality of writing and personal reflection here expressed.
August 23, 2001

From one Shillingtonian to another...

One of the main regrets of my five years in Shillington (ages 12-16) was that I did not realize that I was walking in the footsteps of one of the greatest authors of all time. John Updike's autobiography, especially as it concerns Shillington, was like reading a bit of my own life. He was an alter boy at the church that is behind my old Miller Street home. I was a busboy at the restaurant that used to be his doctor's office that used to be a house. He used to walk up New Holland Avenue to the cemetary, passing number 39, which would years later be a home (apartment) to me. The hallowed halls of Governor Mifflin Jr. High, where I labored from 7th to 9th grade, were once the halls of the old high school that Mr. Updike once passed through. I wonder if we shared the same locker? The old movie theater, in which I saw my first movie alone, still holds a special place in my history. But through my many walks up and down Philadelphia Avenue, I am saddened by the fact that I was never drawn to number 117. My visits to Shillington in the past decade have been unfortunately too brief, and even before reading Mr. Updike's autobiography I have wanted to return to retrace my old footsteps. However, the walk up and down Philadelphia Avenue will include a stop, a reverential pause, at number 117, the shadow of my life in Shillington.
June 01, 1998

Thank you for being honest

For those who have always wanted to befriend an author who has brought them much joy, this book is a must. John Updike as honest as a friend can be climbs out of the pages of this book and I feel I know him. Who else would share back seat of car stories with you? Only a friend
September 17, 1997

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Couples
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The Early Stories: 1953-1975
by John Updike

Pigeon Feathers
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Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, "Rabbit Remembered"
by John Updike

Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism
by John Updike