SOURCE: “‘I Have Preened, I Have Lived,’” in New York Times Book Review, March 5, 1989, p. 7.

In the following review, Donoghue offers a positive assessment of Self-Consciousness.

When a memoir by a writer as well known as John Updike appears, it inevitably arouses curiosity. But this is not a tell-all autobiography. It consists of six discontinuous chapters: total recall is evidently not proposed. Mr. Updike's method is Lytton Strachey's in “Eminent Victorians” to intuit a life by taking samples of it, making forays into its hinterland and asking the reader to assume that gaps between the specified items could readily be filled by more of much the same substance.

John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pa., of parents neither rich nor poor but Depression-shadowed enough to construe life mostly as difficulty. His father taught unhappily in the local high school and enhanced his income by taking mechanical jobs...