Lore Segal on Phone Calls, Proust, and the Poet Theodor Kramer

This week's story, " Stories About Us ," is another installation in your " Ladies' Lunch" series . Here, the women talk about being subjects in stories that Bridget is writing "about a group of friends getting older together." Why did you want to add that metafictional element?

I am always puzzled about questions about why I put things in stories. I am not so interested in questions. The fact of the matter is I don't know. They seem to fit in because they belong in there.

I suppose because the friends are interested in their own commotions, otherwise there would not be any interest.

In the West Side Rag , Anya Schiffrin wrote about the real group of ladies you've lunched with for many decades, one of whom is her mother. How important has this group of friends been to you?

The ladies have been very important to me. What is important is their lives, not my writing about them. Their importance has been in our importance to one another. The ladies have been my best friends.

This opening section, "In the Mail," starts with a quote from Robert Gottlieb. How nerve-racking—or frustrating!—is the period when a writer is waiting to hear from a friend or editor?

Gottlieb said it well—how it feels to wait for a response. Dear Gottlieb, you said that very well. "Excruciating" is the word.

In "Grandmother Mole," the friends discuss another kind of experience they have no control over—the wait to hear from younger relatives. You quote from the Nichols and May sketch about a mother complaining that her son hasn't called. Are there ever enough phone calls?

The phone calls are enough from the ones you care about. I love it when the young people that I love call me.

Was it fun to make up Grandmother Mole's story?

The Grandmother Mole part of the story was difficult to write. I didn't like it—it gave me trouble to make up. I had difficulty in adding the Nichols and May sketch, which I enormously admire, into the story.

Bridget, alone among the friends, it seems, is a Proust reader. She tells the friends that the payoff "is that you come across improbable behaviors and recognize your friends—recognize yourself." How important has Proust been in your own reading?

Proust drives me crazy. I love him so much because reading him is so difficult.

If you could return to one volume of Proust, which one would it be?

Like everyone else, the first volume of Proust. "Swann's Way" is my favorite.

Bridget uses Proust to talk about two different whys: the why that expects a "because," and the " 'Why, how curious,' with an exclamation mark!" Is that a way of approaching life? Are you more interested in "because" or "how curious"?

I am the why for curiosity.

In the final section, Ilka, the character who shares your childhood history of being forced to flee Vienna on a Kindertransport, is translating a poem by the Austrian poet Theodor Kramer, who also had to escape the Nazis. Can you talk a little about his life and work? Is he a poet you read as a young woman?

I did not know the work of Theodor Kramer as a young person, but he was the favorite poet of my favorite uncle, Paul. Oddly enough, or not so oddly, he also came to England. I came as a young child and he came as an adult. Coincidentally, he was a librarian at a college in a town called Guildford at the same time that I was a Guildford high-school student. We never knew each other. I'm sorry about that.

In your "Ladies' Lunch" stories, Ilka repeatedly comes back to her experience as a child . Is it ever possible to comprehend fully the horror of that period? Is Theodor Kramer's poem another means of exploring the way ordinary life can suddenly be sundered?

Horror stories are incomprehensible. You don't want to think about horror stories. That poem is a humdinger for this heart. For me, as an Austrian, you can't tell me how horrendously that beats for me.

Is there anything you'd like to add?

I am serious and funny. I don't know how to be serious without being funny.