Roger Ebert: I'm Not Dying

Like others who read the profile of Roger Ebert in Esquire, Ebert himself got a "jolt" when he saw the full-page photo of face, now altered by cancer surgeries. But he has no regrets about it. "Not a lovely sight," he writes in the Chicago Sun-Times. "But then I am not a lovely sight, and in a moment I thought, well, what the hell. It's just as well it's out there. That's how I look, after all."

Ebert praises writer Esquire Chris Jones for a nice job, though he wants to clarify an impression some got from lines such as "Ebert is dying in increments" and a reference to "the time he has left." Ebert writes: "Well, we're all dying in increments. I don't mind people knowing what I look like, but I don't want them thinking I'm dying. To be fair, Chris Jones never said I was. If he took a certain elegiac tone, you know what? I might have, too." (More Roger Ebert stories.)