Katie Roiphe has been all over the media as of late, promoting her book The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, in which she recounts the last days of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter.

The latest article is “Katie Roiphe’s 6 favorite books that deal with illness and dining,” and surprising it’s not the same six. Making the cut are:

• The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy
• On Being Ill, by Virginia Woolf
• Mortality, by Christopher Hitchens
• Illness as Metaphor, by Susan Sontag
• This Wild Darkness, by Harold Brodkey
• Endpoint, by John Updike

Of the latter she writes, “These poems, which Updike wrote during his last couple of years, are startling, visceral responses to his lung cancer. They have his trademark elegance and sensual beauty, but they also have the urgency of news flashes. He writes his way through the harrowing experience — analyzing, raging, consoling, creating — and in the end produces an astonishing coda to an unusually and gloriously productive life.”