Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee.

I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.

Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family.

Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.