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that our romance with our secret self also includes the suspicion that we’re special (exempt from the common fate even as we seek to embrace common pleasures), we’re complicit in the betrayal of Nora/Molly, dismayed to be her betrayer’s partner in crime, aware of the load of remorse he will necessarily shoulder—and yet unable to condemn his adolescent urge to get out . To read the story sympathetically is to hear a melancholy echo of our own tenderest regrets.
    The more Updike one reads, and the more one learns about his life, the more glaringly obvious it becomes that he was enthralled by the details of his own experience. Does it make him a lesser artist that he so often relied on self-portraits and transcriptions of actual events and circumstances? Perhaps it would if the portraits were documentary photorealism and the action unedited chronology: the prose equivalent of a live webcam. Though he announced his desire to “imitate reality with increasing closeness,” he knew full well that there is no way of translating raw experience into words without altering it. And that was never his intention. He selected, he edited, sensing acutely the drift and propensity of seemingly unimportant actions, sharpening the blur of daily life so that meaning began to emerge; the altered, fictionalized story, now freighted with significance, displaced the less dramatically compelling reality. The particular brilliance with which he made his autobiographical material come alive on the page is part of the reward of reading him. In a curious way, the autobiographical elements deepen and complicate the reader’s enjoyment: The informed reader learns to distinguish between the subtle magic of transcribed experience and the different, bolder magic of less securely tethered imaginative gestures.
     
    P ART OF WHAT allowed Updike the freedom to indulge his autobiographical impulse was his relationship with his mother, the elderly woman who tugged at Ecenbarger’s sleeve in the Shillington public library, eager to talk about her son, the famous writer. To say that Linda Hoyer Updike encouraged her only child and nurtured his precocious talent is to understate and simplify an unusually close and complicated relationship. She helped him to become a writer (and he, when the time came, helped her); she offered him yards of advice and unstinting praise from the moment he set pen to paper. She was, as he put it, “an ideally permissive writer’s mother,” meaning that he was free to write exactly what he pleased, no matter how painful to his family. He explained that his parents shared an “un-middleclass appetite for the jubilant horrible truth,” and that they were “never other than encouraging, even when old wounds were my topic.” And a lucky thing, too, for he pinned his artistic courage on the notion that “only truth is useful. Only truth can be built upon.”
    His mother’s respect for her son’s unflinching honesty was noted by the biographer Ron Chernow, who went to see Linda Updike in Plowville in the early seventies when he was a young journalist eager to write something—anything—about John Updike. Chernow remembers asking her how it felt to pop up as a character in her son’s fiction, specifically in Of the Farm . * According to Chernow, “She paused and said, ‘When I came upon the characterization of myself as a large, coarse country woman I was very hurt.’ She said she walked around for several days, brooding—and then she realized she was a large, coarse country woman.” (Chernow hastened to add that although her personality wasn’t at all coarse, the description accurately captured her look—the stocky build, the husky voice, the pleasantly plain face, the utterly unglamorous clothing.)
    Although he habitually referred to her as a “would-be writer,” Updike’s mother was in fact, under her maiden name, Linda Grace Hoyer, a published writer—with what in any other family would seem an enviable