Quotation

[Updike’s] body was his self, and vice versa, so he wrote his memoirs as though he were tattooing the words on every inch of his hide — inscribing his story on the body, inside and out. “Truth,” he writes, “is anecdotes, narrative, the snug, opaque quotidian.” An anecdote is a body in motion, animated clay. Truth, for Updike, reveals itself in the interaction of the corporeal (skin, teeth, throat, lungs) and the spirit. Is it any surprise that he was prone to psychosomatic illness? Or that sex meant so much to him? This is how he conceived of human meaning: memory, emotion, conscience, all precious intangibles of our consciousness, affixing themselves to living tissue, to flesh and bone. —Adam Begley, Updike (New York: Harper/HarperCollins, 2014), p. 429.