NEW YORK (AP) - Lore Segal has this ongoing conversation with her friends about old age.
"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.
She was born Lore Groszmann in Vienna, Austria, in 1928, a bank officer's daughter. The Groszmanns lived comfortably until a decade later when persecution of the Jews led her family to ship her off on the "Kindertransport" to London, a time Segal and her mother would discuss in Mark Jonathan Harris' Academy Award-winning documentary "Into the Arms of Strangers."
Through hardship, she learned to write. The letters she sent to British officials enabled her parents to go to England, where they worked as domestic servants. Lore stayed with a series of foster families, including one whose incomprehension of her past inspired her first real piece of storytelling.
"It seemed to me they had no idea of what it was like to live in Vienna under Hitler. They were asking me questions that didn't seem to be relevant. They had some profound lack of information," she says.
"So I got hold of one of those little exercise books, homework books. I remember it clearly. It had a sort of purple cover, with a white label with a red rim around it. And I filled the 36 pages in German with the story, which is essentially the story of "Other People's Houses.'
"I remember that was the first experience of writing, where you're putting something down and you have a feeling it's not saying what it's supposed to be. So you throw in exclamation points and sunrises and sunsets, and you keep feeling, "They're not going to get it.' So that was the first attempt to write, and all its griefs."
After the war, Segal graduated from the University of London's Bedford College and lived briefly in the Dominican Republic until allowed in the United States, in 1951. She tried out a series of jobs for which she was equally unqualified: She was a "bad file clerk," a "bad secretary" and a "pretty bad textile designer," although for that job she at least got to work near the main branch of the New York Public Library.
Writing was the best fit, but not the most practical; she couldn't figure out her subject. She had never been in love and believed "no big things" had ever happened to her, not even being a Jew in Europe during World War II. Her breakthrough came after enrolling in a writing class at the New School for Social Research in New York.
"After the class we all kept meeting and doing our own creative writing class," she says. "And somebody said to me, 'How did you get to America?' And I began to tell the stories. And there was that experience, of people listening. It was lovely. Nobody had ever done that. Most people don't have that experience, their story being valued."
She fictionalized her childhood in "Other People's Houses," serialized in The New Yorker and published in book form in 1964. Fellow author Cynthia Ozick would remember reading Segal in the magazine and becoming "mad with impatience" to read each installment, captured by a voice "unlike any other I had ever known. The subject was extreme, yet there was no bitterness in it."
Around the time she was writing "Other People's Houses," she married David Segal, an editor with whom she had two children. (He died in 1970) She wrote "Lucinella," a satire of New York literary life, and continued the story of "Other People's Houses" in "Her First American," which did not come out until the mid-1980s.
"I keep rewriting everything 48 times," she says. "There are writers, I think, who love the empty page and the act of invention and who usually hate rewriting. ... But for me the act of invention is painful. I don't know how to come up with things.
"What most people believe is "polishing' isn't polishing at all. It's, in fact, finding the right syntax that means what I want it to mean, or the word I hadn't thought of yesterday, or the whole phrase I don't need and I can take out. It's not that I'm making it pretty. I'm finding out what I'm talking about."
Author Vivian Gornick, a close friend, says Segal "has more mental and spiritual energy than anyone I know." Gornick's affection for Segal is not far from how Segal described Ilka in "Her First American." Ilka was a "goodhearted girl," Segal writes, "who did not want people to get hurt, but she liked the excitement of a row."
"She is always up for conversation," Gornick says of Segal. "It thrills me. She has wisdom. And, above all, she is eager to fight. We disagree on a lot of things, but we disagree in an extremely useful way, an extremely nourishing way."
The two friends most often argue about books. Gornick is a fan of modernism. Segal would rather read Henry James. Gornick likes not only a good story, but a story that says something about the society in which it takes place. Segal cares more about emotions and conflicts, whether the displacement of the refugee or the joke in "Shakespeare's Kitchen" about how "some women flash their ankles, and some women flash their smarts."
"I want to write about the stuff - in the midst of all the stew of being a human being - that is permanent, where Adam and Eve and I would have had the same experiences. I really am less interested in the social change," she says.