Michelle Herman's latest book is the essay collection If You Say So. Her books include three earlier essay collections – The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and Like A Song – as well as four novels (Missing, Dog, Devotion, and Close-Up), the novella collection A New and Glorious Life, and a book for children, A Girl’s Guide to Life.
At Electric Lit Herman tagged "a list of books in which it’s friendship that matters most, in every decade of a woman’s life." One title on the list:
Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories by Lore SegalRead about the other books on Herman's list at Electric Lit.
No round-up of books about women’s friendship would be complete without this one by Lore Segal. Brilliant, witty, fierce, full of surprises,this book was published a year almost to the day before her death, in 2024, at 96. (Full disclosure: Lore Segal and I were longtime friends.) If you don’t know her work, I urge you to read all of it, but there’s no reason not to start with this final collection, most of which is about a group of friends, now in their 90s, who’ve been close for decades. They meet regularly for lunch, where they tell each other everything. “We are the people to whom we tell our stories,” one of them tells the others. And so, when they can no longer meet in person, they talk on the phone and over Zoom—they persevere. As Lore Segal did.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
