I met up with Updike at Mass General – that is to say, at the Wang Ambulatory Care Centre of Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. The brilliant, fanatically productive and scandalously self-revealing novelist had been scheduled to have a cancerous or cancer-prone wart removed from the side of his hand at 9.30 that morning. It was 10.30 when we eye-contacted each other in the swirling ground-floor cafeteria. “You know what I look like,” he had said on the telephone. And there was no mistaking him (apart from anything else, he was the healthiest man there): tall, “storklike,” distinctly avian, with the questing curved nose and the hairstyle like a salt-and-pepper turban. “How are you?” I said, with some urgency.
more from The Guardian here.