Ladies Who Still Lunch

The new posthumous gathering of Lore Segal’s final stories is a wise and funny tribute to the power of friendship.

By Na’amit Sturm NagelMarch 17, 2026

• Fiction

LORE SEGAL’S DAUGHTER Beatrice recalled to me her mother saying that “she never really understood an experience until she wrote about it.” As a reader of her fiction, I, too, have had experiences I never understood until Segal wrote about them. In Still Talking (2026), her posthumously published collection, we eavesdrop on wise, sharp, funny older women whose failing eyesight and fluctuating memories somehow make the world look sharper.

Still Talking is mostly comprised of conversations between a group of women who have been talking, debating, and lunching with one another for over 40 years. In this collection, the women have reached their nineties, but age has distilled their ability to speak about the darker and more depressing aspects of life. Segal was involved in approving the publication of her final stories and continued working on her writing until the very end; the last short story she published appeared in The New Yorker the day she died, October 7, 2024. Like her characters, Segal spent her final years considering the vantage point of old age and what it allowed her to see, say, and appreciate that was not visible or sayable in her earlier years.

When I wrote a tribute to Lore Segal in this very publication, soon after her death over a year ago, I didn’t imagine that I would have the opportunity to review a new piece of her writing. I am grateful to Melville House (as all Segal’s faithful readers should be) for compiling her final stories into a collection. These stories were originally published between 2023 and 2024, in the last years of Segal’s life, but reading them serially, as a kind of sequel to her previous story collection, Ladies’ Lunch (2023), feels like a gift.

Segal’s writing over her nearly seven decades of publishing was populated by a certain cast of characters. Those who have been following the author’s career know almost the entire ensemble. Thus, reading Still Talking feels like being greeted by old friends, or having a new season added to a favorite TV show one thought had ended. Though the stories function individually, the characters are consistent from one to the next, and threads tie the stories together, even reaching back to Segal’s earlier works. Lucinella sounds like Lucinella from Segal’s 1976 novella by that name; Bridget is just as anxious about her writing as the character by the same name in Ladies’ Lunch; and Ilka still references her time in Vienna and on the Kindertransport that readers read about in more detail in Her First American (1985) and Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2007)—and which echoed certain elements of Segal’s personal experiences on the Kindertransport, recounted in her first novel, Other People’s Houses (1964). The return of these unique voices makes one feel as though these women’s lives have continued all these years between the texts’ publications, and that we, the readers, have had the privilege of growing old with them, and the blessing of witnessing the dignity and humor with which they age.

The title of the collection reveals the tenacity of the project. The stories emphasize the strength and energy it takes this cast of women—who are dealing with illness, the loss of their spouses and loved ones, and, most upsettingly, the pain of “forgetting”—to even leave the house. They show up for one another even when that involves schlepping outside of the city (“no more planes, no more trains”) or inhabiting a box on a Zoom screen. While the title refers to “talking,” it might be more accurate to have called the collection Still Arguing or Still Complaining. These women—Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, Bridget, Ilka, Hope, and Lucinella, all of whom the reader comes to know and love—debate the state of the world and how best to live in it with an ailing body and failing memory. They discuss the challenges of their very current reality—bemoaning Donald Trump’s presidency, the isolation imposed by COVID-19, and the affordances and limitations of new technologies—yet these conversations all come back to more timeless questions and struggles, centering on Segal’s favorite pastime: asking “why?”

The stories capture all the different versions of what talking sounds like. Inspired by real-life ladies’ lunches the author attended once a month for “some thirty-odd years” (as Vivian Gornick points out in her introduction), Segal digs into the very nature of conversation, which is sometimes stream of consciousness, sometimes one-sided, and always confrontational. Occasionally the conversation gets picked up, occasionally it gets lost, and consistently it says more about the speaker than their interlocutor. Real talking is disorderly and chaotic. For instance, when Bridget tells her friends about her cupboard of bags that explodes when she opens it, Lucinella responds with the incongruous issue that she needs to keep all her “pencils in a row, sharpened to perfect points,” and Hope starts complaining about the woman who cleans her apartment and “doesn’t put things back where they belong,” only for all the women to realize that the original agenda of the day has been abandoned: they were supposed to be talking about “what our lot understands by ‘wokeness.’” The incongruity between the plan to delve into intergenerational understandings of contemporary ideology and the reality that their discussion devolves into quibbles about organizing bags and sharpening pencils is comical. But Segal makes us realize that the questions these women are asking are the questions we all should be asking: I do. I know I do. But why do I? What is it for? Why do we neaten nature into gardens? Asking the evergreen questions related to why “we yearn for order” becomes the off-agenda focus of the day and soon interests the reader much more than a zeitgeisty conversation about “wokeness.”

Segal makes us attuned to the fact that when we talk, we get to these questions through complaining, debating, and telling stories. Even when the story “In the Mail” begins with Hope proposing “Let’s get the complaining out of the way,” the story consists, from beginning to end, of the women kvetching to one another. In “The Half Century Dispute,” Ilka reflects on how her cousin Frieda took her in after the war but they’ve spent their lifelong friendship fighting. Farah asks how this works and Ilka explains that their “project […] is to be reconciled to quarrelling,” adding, “It’s in the nature, on my part certainly, of a demonstration, proof that we live in a democracy where people—and people we love—may have different, have wrong, opinions.” All the stories in the collection are founded on this premise: friends disagree, but it is these disagreements that make the friendships worthwhile. Through complaining, they find camaraderie, and through fighting, their understanding of the world and of one another grows.

Perhaps the most elemental aspect of these lunches involves the women using each other to try to help themselves remember. The story “January: The Forgetting Olympics” turns the obsession with remembering into an “Olympic sport.” When Farah suggests a special ladies’ lunch session dedicated to forgetting, the women have questions, but their questions only clarify that all their meetings have unwittingly engaged in this competition. As soon as Farah raises the idea, the one-upmanship becomes fierce:

Bessie said, “You mean whoever forgets the most names gets the gold?”

“Forgets more words, words, words,” said Bridget.

“And dates and appointments,” Farah said.

Bessie said, “Addresses. I remember Lotte calling me several times for the address of the party that turned out to be—I forget, what do we call a Jewish wake?” […]

“Forgetting people,” Ilka said. […]

“I picked up a story I published in 2007,” Bridget said. “It’s not that I don’t recognize what I wrote, but I couldn’t think how it ended.”

A mixture of humor and tragedy populates this list. The contest reverses the pain and sadness of forgetting by reframing it as a rewarding experience, though none of these women idealizes the loosening of the strands of memory. Yet finding a way to process the sadness by experiencing the loss communally and facing forgetting with humor allows for reframing. If you can remember you’re forgetting, then is all not forgotten? If everyone around you is also forgetting, at least you are not alone.

Segal wrote these stories between the ages of 95 and 96, but she had been spinning traumatic experiences into productive material most of her life. Segal’s first book, her autobiographical novel Other People’s Houses, approaches with a wry tone her experience of being sent on the Kindertransport. In Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, a 2000 documentary film about the same experience, Segal looks back at her tumultuous childhood and thinks:

I am dazzled, from the point of view of the writer. Who else has the unbelievable good fortune to live with the Jewish manufacturer, the English working-class union-man railroad stoker, the milkman, the Anglo-Indian Victorian ladies—whoever has the sheer advantage of not studying this from the outside, but being a helpless member from the inside of these families? It seems to me it was a gift—didn’t seem so at the time.

This retrospective framing transforms Segal from “the victim” into “the writer,” recasting her childhood displacement—being taken from her parents at age 10 and navigating five different foster homes amid the dangers of the time—as “good fortune,” “sheer advantage,” and “a gift.” She has won the wartime Olympics! Through the act of writing itself, Segal converts what was objectively traumatic into a tragicomic travelogue. Yet a characteristic Segalian gap emerges between her initial portrayal and her candid admission that it “didn’t seem so at the time.” “The Forgetting Olympics,” too, ends with just such a gap: Farah concludes by desperately trying to remember what her nephew looks like, “before we forget what there is to remember.”

Still Talking is a bookend to Segal’s career and to the questions she has been asking and recording in her writing since childhood. In this final story collection, the reader familiar with her oeuvre can sense her teasing out the through lines of her lifelong attempts to remember the past and deepen her understanding of it. As a Kindertransport refugee, she tried to understand the adults in her world and the epistemes they subconsciously—and, to her childhood mind, somewhat arbitrarily—perpetuated. Then, as a grandmother, she wrote children’s books, which are out of print and somewhat hard to find (but I can attest to their magic), and which ask the same questions from the vantage point of a young mole. Why Mole Shouted and Other Stories (2004), part of a broader collection about a grandmother mole who raises her grandson mole while desperately trying to understand his mood swings, concludes with the judgment that most of the child’s tantrums were just an attempt at him communicating: “Notice me!”

In one story in Still Talking, “Grandmother Mole,” Segal returns to the Mole family. Bessie reflects on how she used to love reading the Moles’ story to her grandson, but now he is older and no longer needs stories or comes to visit. Bridget, one of Segal’s fictional surrogates, brings a new story she wrote to their next meeting in which Grandmother Mole tells her grandson: “What I want […] is for you to want to visit me, to want to talk and to be with me.” The women discuss this developed childhood story sequel in which the roles have been reversed and it is now the grandmother who needs to yell “Notice me!” They use fiction and the writing of fiction across time to understand this painful, infantilizing reversal.

All these women are faced with death, and some of them die in the course of the collection, yet they are then kept alive through these conversations. In “Beyond Imagining,” the reader is surprised to learn that “it was now several years since Lotte had died in an assisted-living facility.” Bessie recounts memories of Lotte at different moments in various stories in Still Talking, but in Ladies’ Lunch, Lotte was still alive: in the story “How Lotte Lost Bessie,” Lotte writes Bessie to recall how much she shaped her life and how she is sad that they have drifted apart. The letter ends with “I’ll give you a call.” In Still Talking, Lotte has died, but Bessie keeps reminding everyone of her: “I remember Lotte calling me several times for the address”; “Do you remember Lotte saying that things not put properly away were like ‘visual noise’?”; “The time Lotte and I and our two guys lit out for Europe after our final exams.” Though Lotte never calls Bessie, there is a conversation between these two books; she is not forgotten. We see the women talking to one another even when their conversation exceeds the corporeal boundaries of traditional lifespans.

“Beyond Imagining” opens with all the women agreeing “without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on. They were going to die.” Though one of the greatest American writers has died, I believe that all readers of this collection would also agree that the vibrancy of her writing and the way she talks to the reader mean that she has not “passed away” or “on.” Since reading the collection, I have found myself engaging in hypothetical conversations with these women, asking “why” about how my life functions, and then imagining Segal’s response (her famous “Isn’t that interesting!”). Though there is much to mourn in the loss of such a masterful author, her final posthumously published collection contains much that reminds us of her vibrancy, keeping a conversation with her and her writing alive for her readers.