Today the National Post posted a story by “Barbara Kay: We all know about John Updike. But what about his mother?” 

In it, she talks about her friend, David Siegel, an “evolving short-story writer” and his experience taking an Iowa Writer’s Workshop summer class from Robert Anthony Siegel in which a classmate was Siegel’s own 75-year-old mother, and that leads her to consider the relationship that Updike had with his own mother, also an aspiring writer who was published late in life after her son’s success, but who worked at becoming a writer when he was still a young boy.

“Perhaps Linda’s greatest gift to her son was her unconditional respect for the artist’s obligation to speak his own truth without regard to the feelings of those he writes about,” Kay writes.