IN: Schlessinger was born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. She was raised in Brooklyn and later on Long Island. Her parents were Monroe "Monty" Schlessinger, a civil engineer, and Yolanda (nee Ceccovini) Schlessinger, an Italian Catholic war bride. Schlessinger has said her father was charming and her mother beautiful as a young woman.

Schlessinger met and married Michael F. Rudolph, a dentist, in 1972 while she was attending Columbia University. The couple had a Unitarian ceremony. Separating from Rudolph, Schlessinger moved to Encino, California in 1975 when she obtained a job in the science department at the University of Southern California. Their divorce was finalized in 1977.  In 1975, while working in the labs at USC, she met Lewis G. Bishop, a professor of neurophysiology who was married and the father of three children. Bishop separated from his wife and began living with Schlessinger the same year. Speaking as one who went through and has personal experience with the social problems associated with such lifestyle choices, Schlessinger has vociferously proclaimed her disapproval of unwed couples "shacking up" and having children out of wedlock, helping others to not make the bad choices in the first place. According to her friend Shelly Herman, "Laura lived with Lew for about nine years before she was married to him." "His divorce was final in 1979. Bishop and Schlessinger married in 1985. Herman says that Schlessinger told her she was pregnant at the time, which Herman recalls as "particularly joyful because of the happy news." Schlessinger's only child, a son named Deryk, was born in November 1985.  Schlessinger's husband, Lewis G. Bishop, died November 2, 2015, after being ill for 1.5 years.  Schlessinger was estranged from her sister for years, and many thought she was an only child. She had not spoken to her mother for 18 to 20 years before her mother's death in 2002 from heart disease. Her mother's remains were found in her Beverly Hills condo approximately two months after she died, and lay unclaimed for some time in the Los Angeles morgue before Schlessinger had them picked up for burial. Concerning the day that she heard about her mother's death, she said: "Apparently she had no friends and none of her neighbors were close, so nobody even noticed! How sad." In 2006, Schlessinger wrote that she had been attacked in a "vulgar, inhumane manner by media types" because of the circumstances surrounding her mother's death, and that false allegations had been made that she was unfit to dispense advice based on family values. She said that she had not mourned the deaths of either of her parents because she had no emotional bond to them.

Did Laura have any other family near by?

OUT: Concerning the day that she heard about her mother's death, she said: "Apparently she had no friends and none of her neighbors were close, so nobody even noticed! How sad.


IN: John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only three writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner), Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.

The principal themes in Updike's work are religion, sex, and America as well as death. Often he would combine them, frequently in his favored terrain of "the American small town, Protestant middle class", of which he once said, "I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."  For example, the decline of religion in America is chronicled in In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) alongside the history of cinema, and Rabbit Angstrom contemplates the merits of sex with the wife of his friend Reverend Jack Eccles while the latter is giving his sermon in Rabbit, Run (1960).  Critics have often noted that Updike imbued language itself with a kind of faith in its efficacy, and that his tendency to construct narratives spanning many years and books--the Rabbit series, the Henry Bech series, Eastwick, the Maples stories--demonstrates a similar faith in the transcendent power of fiction and language. Updike's novels often act as dialectical theological debates between the book itself and the reader, the novel endowed with theological beliefs meant to challenge the reader as the plot runs its course. Rabbit Angstrom himself acts as a Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith.  Describing his purpose in writing prose, Updike himself, in the introduction to his Early Stories: 1953-1975 (2004), wrote that his aim was always "to give the mundane its beautiful due." Elsewhere he famously said, "When I write, I aim my mind not towards New York but towards a vague spot east of Kansas." Some have suggested that the "best statement of Updike's aesthetic comes in his early memoir 'The Dogwood Tree'" (1962): "Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else. And in fact there is a color, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm."

What other books did he write

OUT:
Rabbit, Run (1960).