RIP Lore Segal – the American writer, at 96.
She wrote her latest collection of short stories, Ladies’ Lunch, at 95. It is full of wry insights into oldie life in New York. Segal quotes the anonymous one-liner, ‘How pleasant the sight of a cheerful old person.’
And she was good at insights into the declining returns of old age: ‘Those were the days when I used to know eighty per cent of the people at a party. Now I know two people.’
Segal, born into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna in 1928, escaped the Nazis to Britain on one of the first Kindertransport missions. After graduating from Bedford College for Women in London in 1948, she moved to New York. Her first novel, Other People’s Houses, came out in 1964 – and she wrote ever since, for 60 years.
