By interconnecting her novels’ worlds this way, Segal created a feeling of intimacy and community across her body of work—a feeling that her dislocated characters repeatedly express desire for. In Shakespeare’s Kitchen, Ilka finishes a conversation with two new acquaintances by asking them, “Will you be my elective cousins?…. I’m low on the kind one has by blood.” In Her First American, a younger Ilka, on a trip to the country with Carter and a few other couples, announces, “I like it so much to see old friends talking together…. I traveled so much to and fro Europe I have always lost all my friends again.” In her fiction, Segal offers her reader the fulfillment that she wished for in life.

There is an acute sense of seeking, and finding, fulfillment in Segal’s fictional world, which sharpens both the pains and the joys. At the end of Other People’s Houses, Segal takes stock of the ease and pleasures of her life in New York (“every day there are hours when I can write, and we have our friends”). Her American husband, she says, “accepts without alarm this normal season of our lives; but I, now that I have children and am about the age my mother was when Hitler came, walk gingerly and in astonishment upon this island of my comforts, knowing it is surrounded on all sides by calamity.”

Time gave this passage new poignancy: Six years after the book’s publication, Segal’s American husband, David, died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving her to raise their two children alone. Yet her sense of astonishment appears undimmed in later works; loss seems to have lent it a new urgency. Perhaps what I’ve identified as Segal’s precocity was a refusal to let her intelligence and powers of observation be constricted by cynicism, even in the face of tragedy. Her curiosity partook of a stubborn optimism.

For Segal’s characters, intelligence is inseparable from a hunger for experience, a quality that the writer Han Ong has described as Segal’s “avidity.” Segal’s characters love to talk; they are always engaged in big, lively conversations. (In Her First American, Ilka’s wonder and puzzlement at American speech and idiom reflects that of Segal, who writes with a magnificent sense of precision and fun. At one point, she describes Carter’s sleeping breath as “a necklace of little farts.”) They find sensual and intellectual satisfaction in their interpersonal relationships, friendly as well as romantic. The first love scene between Carter and Ilka begins with Carter telling her to take off her blouse. “‘I have always wondered before how people come to have taken their blouses off,’ chattered Ilka. ‘I always wondered how the bed has become open.’” In Shakespeare’s Kitchen, when Ilka and Leslie Shakespeare, one of her “elective cousins,” begin a secret affair (a recurring feature of Segal’s work), he insists, “One must live, to live.”

Segal was a writer who lived on the page, really lived, joyfully and infectiously. And this spirit did not depend on her perceiving things selectively or sentimentally and then filtering out the rest. Pleasure for Segal came from her interest in the world as it is. Carried through Her First American by Ilka’s avidity and her own sense of humor, Segal was able to write about race in America in a way that few white writers of her generation dared to, looking closely at the insults and indignities that Black people in America face. And Ilka is not spared; she is portrayed as naïve but not as innocent. At one point, she asks Carter why a young white woman they know married her older Black husband and then stops herself, realizing the implications of what she is saying.

“You think I mean that?” cried Ilka. “What did you mean?” “That!” said Ilka with the thrill of revelation. “I’m a racist!” “Not to worry,” Carter said. “Some of my best friends are racists.”

Another aspect of the avidity of Segal’s characters is their constant desire to be told stories by other people. In reading her body of work, I understood the meaning of this request in a new way. Coming from Segal, “Tell me a story”—the refrain of a precocious child—is not a wish to be comforted or put to bed but a demand for access to more life, however brutal. I appreciated, suddenly, the fearlessness it takes to maintain a childlike hunger for the world.

It is little surprise, then, that Segal also directed her playful imagination toward children’s literature. Her first children’s book, Tell Me a Mitzi, published in 1970 and reissued this past summer by New York Review Books, starts with the line “Tell me a story,” spoken by a child named Martha to her mother. Her mother invents a story about a little girl named Mitzi taking her baby brother out on an independent adventure in New York—taking the elevator, hailing a cab. The story offers Martha a feeling of freedom, or even danger, within the experience of safety, as good stories do, and in the two remaining sections of the book, she increasingly demands more.

“Tell me a Mitzi,” said Martha.“Later I will,” said her mother. “Now I’ve got a headache.” In a little while Martha asked her mother, “Mommy, now is it later?”“No,” said her mother. “It’s still now.”

It was in Segal’s late work that her precocity reached its unlikely climax. Nearing 90, she started writing the series of stories that became the book Ladies’ Lunch. The worlds of Segal’s characters had grown smaller and more confined—one story ends with the line “Who said that wakes and funerals are the cocktail parties of the old?”—but she brought the full force of her curiosity to the transformations and degradations of old age, a foreign land to all who reach it.

Ladies’ Lunch is an achievement of late style, a chronicle of an experience—aging and dying—that we rarely see discussed and analyzed with so much personality and self-possession. In the story “The Arbus Factor,” a man named Jack and a woman named Hope go to lunch and reminisce about a trip to France they took long ago, before they married other people. They fantasize about returning and wonder together what’s to stop them. Then there’s a turn: “There were a lot of reasons, of course, to keep them from going back,” Segal writes, shifting suddenly to the points of view of their grown children, as Jack’s son enters the restaurant “on his way to the corner where, an hour ago, he had folded up his father’s wheelchair.” This moment comes as a shock—to see Jack and Hope as the world sees them, after seeing them the way they see themselves.

The relationship among the women of Ladies’ Lunch is one of intellectual fellowship, and each gathering has a conversational “agenda”—a subject the women want to mine together for meaning or understanding. This group is apparently based on a real one, but the characters feel more like refractions of Segal’s distinctly avid literary mind than like particular individuals. The first line of dialogue spoken in the book is this: “You remember that we are the people to whom we tell our stories? Well, I have a story for you.” Later in the book, another woman echoes the same idea: “When I suddenly sat on my rear on the sidewalk outside my front door, I was looking forward to telling you.” They talk about death, illness, and the loss of their faculties or autonomy—nearly unbearable subjects to contemplate, were it not yet again for the pleasures of thinking. When someone asks a good question, the others respond by “brightening,” or with “interest” that “pricked right up.” In the titular story, a woman named Lotte won’t put up with the full-time caregivers her sons have hired, so they plan to move her to an assisted-living facility in the Hudson Valley. At lunch, in response to Lotte’s unhappiness, the ladies discuss “the scenarios we would rather die than live in.”

“And it was you,” a woman named Farah says to Lotte, “who said you wanted to see it all, to see what would happen to the end.”

What happens at the end was one of Segal’s key and long-standing preoccupations as a writer: the way that time takes away the world as we love it. She closed not one but three of her novels with a rapid acceleration into the future, delivering the reader to a time when many of the book’s characters have died and the story we were absorbed in has become a memory. As in life, we are left in a state of mourning.

But in Ladies’ Lunch, loss does not belong to a faraway time. The present has been made crystalline by its fragility, and though the end may be indeterminate, it feels near. In the last story of the collection, we see the women in Covid quarantine, holding their lunch meeting over Zoom. They are “sitting around telling Lotte stories,” as one of them puts it, to honor their late friend. They ask themselves why they can’t bear to delete the contact information of a person who has died, and Ilka describes old photographs that she brought over from Austria, which she won’t discard even though she does not know the people who appear in them. The women muse together about the “idea of the sacred” in human beings and the “enigma” of “being erased.”

Then the final line to Segal’s final book: “And then their forty minutes were up.”

To the last, Lore Segal was a writer who was alive to the poetry of the present moment—a writer who never turned away from the world.

What’s more, it seems like this quality was palpable in every interaction she had. So much writing that has been published about Segal’s work also spoke to her presence and personal magnetism, which bewitched her many interlocutors. Because I’m lucky enough to have been one of them, I can’t help but fall into this pattern. Last spring, I went up to her Upper West Side apartment (where she had lived, she told me, since the day of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration), clamped a microphone to her desk, and recorded her reading a new piece of writing aloud. Midway through the story, she told me that she was getting tired, that she needed to take a break. She was losing her sight and had to strain to follow the words on her screen. With a small movement, she batted the microphone away from her face, sending it swinging on its long metal arm, and then leaned back in her chair, turned to me, and with a wonderful look of repose said, “Tell me a story.”