One of my uncles died yesterday. Uncle John. You've heard of him, his last name was Updike. Novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, art critic, essayist, husband, ex-husband, father, grandfather, and uncle. Fixture at The New Yorker from the age of 23. Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and heaven knows what else. You don't always find his books in paperback at airport kiosks any more, but you sure used to.

Uncle John married my mother's older sister Mary in 1953. My mother married my dad the next year, and in due course four kids came along at about the same intervals to both couples, so we each had a cousin our own age. When we got together in the summer, four harried adults and eight giddy children stuffed ourselves into John & Mary's Ford Falcon and drove to Crane's Beach to make sand castles. At the end of the day we stopped at the stand on Argilla Road for ice cream cones. If a child was done eating before the ice cream was gone, Irving, my dad, said: "Oh, just throw the cone out the window." And we did. They made a nice plop on the road.

It's very weird having someone famous in the family. Even though I've seen him at his most vividly human: throwing up when he had the flu, or snoring rather loudly as we cousins tiptoed past the sofa, it's hard not to feel the god-like aura that surrounds him in other peoples' minds. Some kid you're in college with or colleague at work breathes: "YOU are related to JOHN UPDIKE?!?!?" I usually admit that I am, but I never know what to do with my face — should I look pleased? Embarrassed? Repentant? My being his niece has nothing to do with anything. He was very present in my childhood, but more as part of a herd of grown-ups than as an individual who knew me well. In college I did some typing for him, before computers were invented. A decade later he commented — very diplomatically — on the first creative thing I ever wrote. He didn't encourage me to keep writing and he hasn't leant me a literary hand of any kind or asked to see my work. He did compliment my first CD of radio essays a few years ago, quite highly. It was such a shock to receive his note I forgot to thank him.

You can read about one of the summers we spent on Martha's Vineyard in his short story, "The Day the Rabbit Died." It was a real rabbit, and it really died. Uncle John turned the eight of us kids into four or five, mingling our characteristics. You can read about throwing ice cream cones out the car window in "Brother Grasshopper," which contains every good family story about my dad. It also contains a big lie. When it ran in The New Yorker after Irving died, friends called to ask, worried, if my father had really been a pornographic movie producer. That hurt my feelings and made me furious, but I loved Uncle John, in case it's starting to sound like maybe I didn't. In the unconscious way you love someone you know familially but not personally: he was an important part of the scenery. I don't always like his writing, but how many people get to have part of their own life preserved in American fiction to look back on: those long summer evenings playing volleyball and tennis, the adults lapping up gin and tonics and flirting with each other? And the kids, seemingly unaware, running around on the lawn.