Ladies' Lunch
and Other Stories
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
National Jewish Book Award Finalist
The New Yorker's Best Book of the Year!
"For almost six decades Segal has quietly produced some of the best fiction and essays in American literature..."—The New York Times
"Segal writes with welcome clarity about life’s final years, and if her characters are not always as wise as they think they are, Segal eyes them all with the unsentimental wisdom of a life spent writing wondrous stories and essays, a career spent telling the truth." - Slate
Beloved New Yorker writer Lore Segal, at 95-years-old, is a national treasure. Working at the height of her powers, in this story collection she turns her gimlet eye and compassionate humor on aging and life in the slow lane.
From the master of the short short comes a collection of 16 new stories featuring old friends who have loved and lunched together for over 40 years. These erudite, sharp-minded nonagenarians offer startling insights into friendship, family and aging.
Can the group organize a visit to one of their number in her new, and detested, assisted living situation? Is this a fabulous party with old friends, or a funeral reception? And does who was sleeping with whom, way back when, still matter?
In story after story, Segal's voice is always hilarious and urbane, heartbreaking and profound, keen and utterly unsentimental, as she tackles aging's affronts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Segal brings her rapier wit to this intelligent collection of mostly recent work, some of which appeared in the anthology The Journal I Did Not Keep. The bulk is comprised of the linked "Ladies Lunch" stories, which feature five elderly friends who gather regularly at each other's homes in Manhattan. In "Sans Teeth, Sans Taste," they discuss the "aches, pains, meds, etc." of aging. In the title story, Lotte's well-meaning sons place her in a Hudson Valley assisted living facility, far from the friends she loves. All the women are widowed except Bessie, whose rich and stuffy husband Colin, the butt of their jokes, is said in "Days of Martini and Forgetting" to be "dying of something slow and ravaging." Among the other stories is "Making Good," about a Jewish former concert pianist who takes part in a community group led by a progressive rabbi and a Catholic priest that is designed to spark dialogue between gentiles from Vienna and Jewish Viennese refugees from the Holocaust. "Ladies' Zoom," a companion piece to the title sequence, finds the women gathering virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic, where they reckon with their fading memories. Segal's unfailing ear and light comedic touch belie the momentous, existential nature of her subject matter. This is funny and moving in equal measure.
