Lore Segal

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The stories in this book take place in a particular situation; they may have a chronology. There is a protagonist, some main characters and a chorus of minor ones, whom you don't always need to tell apart. There is a theme: I was thinking about our need not only for family and sexual love and friendship but for a "set" to belong to: the circle made of friends, acquaintances, and the people one knows.
The immigrant's loss of a circle of blood cousinships is only one example of a modern experience. I once did a poll of the American-born Americans of my acquaintance to see how many of them lived where they grew up. It seemed that only the natives of the northern suburbs of Chicago stayed or returned home. I had moved my own family there for the first two of the fourteen years I taught at the University of Illinois' Circle Campus. My mother, walking between the trim front lawns under a flowering of trees said, "How happy people must be who are happy here." We moved back to Riverside Drive in Manhattan where anyone - transplanted Chicagoan, European, African-American, Asian - might become a cousin, and I commuted to Chicago.
I want to translate Goethe's Wahlverwandschaften as "elective cousins," the cousins we choose. I was thinking about the sometime-comedy of providing oneself with such a new set. How do we meet people we don't know ? How do acquaintances become intimates ? And I was thinking of the sadness when we divorce friends and they turn back into acquaintances who are less than strangers because they can never become future intimates.
Novelists think by writing stories. I had a theme in search of a plot - another modern dilemma. I once allowed myself to be persuaded to turn my novel Her First American into a film script. The would-be producer plied me with scriptwriting lessons. They were very interesting. They said that in a good plot nothing happens that is not the result of what happened before or the cause of what happens next. I like reading stories like that, but I don't write them because that's not how life happens to me or to the people I know. The mental hunt for happenings and causes produces ever more stories: What if you had a dog who thought ill of you ? Imagine a place and time when crime comes out of the dark into broad noon. What if we were forced to hear the sound of torture we know to be happening twenty-four hours a day out of our earshot ? Odds and ends : I watched a salesman walk away from the man who had bought his first computer and was asking, What do I do now ? And the old chestnuts: What if you have ruined a friend ? Each story created its own choreography, became fixed in its shape and would not always attach to what happened before and what was going to happen next.
I have known the state of grace in which everything I thought and heard and saw and read and remembered dovetailed into a novel. Here everything dovetailed into these stories.