I'm bad at thinking about society. I love to make fun of very small aspects. For instance the privacy rules we have in the States. Where you sign this thing that you've never read, and if you ever read it you discover there's no privacy whatsoever. But I don't know how to think sociologically, to tell you the truth. My son is a political scientist and my daughter-in-law is a sociologist. I can't think that way. I am not a good political militant at all. I keep thinking about what the other side must look like.
Lore SegalMy idea in Half the Kingdom was simply, or not so simply perhaps, that medical science has given us twenty extra years of life. Those twenty extra years - one is grateful for them, one is happy, but they also give you ten or twenty years more of losing your faculties. That is actually the origin of my notion. Once you live longer than you're supposed to live, things go dreadfully wrong. But nevertheless, you're not dead.
Lore SegalI did translations of Grimms' Fairy Tales and became very charmed about that way of looking at things. Fairy tales tell a lot of truths. Just as a side point, for instance, we always think the bad guys in fairy tales are the stepmothers, who are witches. But where are the fathers when the witches are killing and mishandling their children? Away. They are on a business trip. They are hunting, they are away. Wow, you know! No one says the fathers are the bad guys! It's one of the things you don't say. But my goodness, where are they?
Lore SegalI wrote Her First American and I always say it took me eighteen years. It took me that long was because after about five years I stopped and wrote Lucinella. I got stuck; it was too hard to write. Lucinella felt like a lark. I wanted to write about the literary circle because it amused me, and I allowed myself to do what I wanted to do. It's just one of the things I'm allowed to do if I feel like it.
Lore SegalIt's hard for us sophisticates to believe, but the people my parents worked for were good people. They were socialists of the heart. They were Scottish upper class. I don't think they had political theories in the way my lefty friends in New York do but they did all the things that socialists do. My mother was the Jewish cook from Vienna and they would say, "Come and have dinner with us." I spent weekends with them. Who does that? This is Utopia.
Lore SegalDid the nineteenth-century novelists create more generously than we do now? In a general reading of contemporary work, do you see a lot of new and different characters, or is it the same character who is a stand-in for the writer? And it's interesting enough, but it's a weakness I think. We are much more self-revealing and less able to produce new people over and over again.
Lore Segal