23 May 2011 03:18:07
"Being old and being sick and expecting not to know what to do with yourself, it stinks," the author says with a smile. "Nevertheless, before it stinks, there's a lot of charm. We'll whisper to each other, `Having a good time? I am.' We're enjoying our friends, enjoying our grandchildren."
She is a most youthful 83, with starry blue eyes, a carefree nest of white hair and a light and musical Viennese accent. And she is still writing. Three years after "Shakespeare's Kitchen" was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, she is in the final revisions of a new novel, "And If They Have Not Died," a fable of doctors and patients and age, but not her age, the next stage — extra-long life, the kind made possible by modern medicine.
"It's a story of how we outlive our lives," Segal says. She adds that she was inspired in part by her mother, who died just a few years ago, as she was about to turn 101. Her mother wasn't sick, but exhausted, "worn out by life."
The author says work is harder now than it was years ago, but she is no less in love with the world. She marvels at the morning sky or how a flick of a wrist can produce hot or cold water. She lives in a sunny apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, her walls a gathering of paintings, knickknacks and — the grand prize — sketches by her old friend Maurice Sendak, including a troll from "Where the Wild Things Are," with a caption that reads "LORE SEGAL."
"She has a great sense of humor. She is a superb human being and a brilliant human being, and she is someone who has not set aside her artistry. She has worked hard," says Sendak, who years ago collaborated with Segal on a translation of Grimm's fairy tales.
Segal is also known for the novels "Other People's Houses" and "Her First American," the novella "Lucinella," and some children's stories she wrote while her children and grandchildren were growing up. One, "When Mole Lost His Glasses," was adapted into an educational video featuring Spike Lee and then-New York Knick Stephon Marbury.
"They get critical reviews like nobody's business," Segal says of her children's books, "and then they go out of print."
Segal's adult books are themselves a kind of conversation. Characters talk a lot in them and they tend to show up in more than one, like Joe Bernstine, director of a think tank in "Shakespeare's Kitchen" and now founder of the "Homeland Research Agency" in "And If They Not Died." Back, too, is Segal's fictional alter ego, Ilka, a young woman still finding herself in "Her First American" and a grandmother in the new novel.
Through the travels and self-discoveries of Ilka and others, Segal's books follow at least the outlines of her life, from early years in Europe shadowed by Hitler's advance, to New York in the 1950s as a new immigrant to the still-expectant present.
