“Ruth said, ‘Remember how we said we are the people in the world to whom we tell things. And that’s us. Something happens and I think, I’ll tell the next ladies’ lunch.’” The four New Yorkers at the core of Lore Segal’s new collection of stories are in their nineties, as is she. Originally from California, Tehran, Co Mayo and the Bronx, the friends have known each other all their adult lives, and now meet once a month for a leisurely lunch. They’ve married, had children, divorced, been widowed and worked as doctors, lawyers, teachers; we find them here ironic, curious and discursive, keen to negotiate the complexities of memory, friendship and their precarious futures.
Occasionally they are joined by Ilke Weisz, a constant in Segal’s fiction since 1985, when her novel Her First American was published. A central character in Shakespeare’s Kitchen (nominated for the Pulitzer prize in 2008), Ilke left Vienna on the Kindertransport, aged ten, as did Segal. At one point Segal herself joins her ladies’ lunch, reading an extract from her debut, Other People’s Houses (1964), a book that tells of her first foster home in England, when already she was putting herself into stories. “Whenever something happens, good or bad, you feel like you’ve just found some gold”, she told the Paris Review in 2019. “You can use this … It’s a pretty fun place to live.”
So at ease is Segal’s voice as she charts the charged landscape of her nineties that we barely notice when these sixteen short pieces segue from one set of characters to another, and finally to three pieces of pure memoir. The whole is driven by conversation, which seems fraught with hesitant intensity, spoken with an urgency that limited circumstances demand yet render ultimately inconsequential. “Let’s have lunch. I’ve got an agenda”, insists Jack on the phone to Hope as “The Arbus Factor” begins. His question, posed over a bottle of merlot, is whether Hope would like to go “back”. She seems keen. “Back? Back to Paris!” Suddenly, life seems an open road once more (“Jack and Hope had lived together before marrying two other people”), and the world filled with possibilities.
It is that same long-ago place wherein another character, Lotte, in a different story, remembers “the thrill, the romance just of lugging our bags through empty Venice” one very late night, guided by a local reveller in a shirt “the colour of moons”. That was a time when there was rancour when one slept with a friend’s ex-husband and argued over the dubious politics of a potential lover. But the days of unfamiliar cities and unexpected liaisons are over; Jack’s wheelchair and an impatient grown son await him. Hope’s grandchildren watch on as she makes her unsteady way to the ladies and sees herself in the mirror, “the crone with the grey shoulder-length hair girlishly loosened. Hope saw what Diane Arbus might have seen. She gazed, appalled”. Yet Segal’s nonagenarians are rarely nonplussed. Everything is grist to the conversational mill. Nothing is merely contingent: “being appalled pricked her interest. ‘I’ve got an agenda: the Arbus factor in old age’”.
Segal’s women are not exactly resigned to old age, but neither are they resistant – though there is a moment when Lotte alarms the lunch party by striking “the empty air” in futile rebellion. Her sons have decided she must live in a care home. Her friends are concerned, but not distraught; there is nothing much they can do except talk through what they might achieve if they could still drive. Agency is no longer an option. Similarly, when Bessie’s children leave for Europe and she feels “like the motherless child”, Bridget, the writer among them, explains: “there’s nowhere for the plot to develop”. Rather than balk at this, Segal seems to enjoy the freedom it engenders, in writing and life. The stories have no beginnings or endings to speak of, but rather a fertile inconclusiveness. They turn on reflective moments, glimpses from windows, or the weather. In “Bedroom Lesson” – one of the memoir pieces – Segal tells of her struggle to shield herself from the blinding sunlight that wakes her every morning; she concludes that this “quarrel” is pointless: the light “does me no harm”.
What would be harmful, Lore Segal implies, would be to lose interest in one another’s stories. The story might be of hearing a scream while in an isolation ward suffering pneumonia, as she did during the Covid pandemic. Or it might be of a wedding ring, long-lost but still sought. It might be of a shivah that you didn’t realize was not simply a party. Friends die, we grow old, but stories survive, and we are lucky to have this piercing collection from a writer who has known for so long how to tell them.
Sheena Joughin has published two novels and is currently scripting a documentary about psychiatry in the 1950s
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