Francesca Segal's Awkward Age

Segal describes the novel as “about the tension between parenthood and personhood — that’s a constant balance.”

Just as The Innocents drew heavily on the world that Segal that grew up in, so The Awkward Age draws on themes that could have come from her experiences. Daniel’s character looms large in his absence. Segal is the daughter of Erich Segal, author of Love Story. Erich died in 2010, and the very fact that this interview — and pretty much everything you’ll read about Francesca — mentions him, proves that he, too, looms large.

Segal makes it clear that there are few parallels to be drawn between her experience of losing a father and Gwen’s. “There’s also a lost father in my first book,” she notes.

“I have experience of grief but my relationship with grief is not something I would write about.”

Nonetheless, her descriptions of loss are very striking. At one point in the book, we learn that “Gwen’s longing for her father was why Julia would not get a new car, nor replace — of all the things about which to be sentimental — the unreliable microwave. Gwen had asked her not to.”

I ask if Daniel, Gwen’s father, is in any way based on her own father? “Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the existence of a daughter who lost her father is probably drawn from my preoccupation and experience with that but Erich and Daniel aren’t the same person. The experience of losing a father at 29 and at eight are very different.”

There is also the theme of parenthood, specifically the mother-daughter relationship, which Segal says she finds “completely fascinating”. Segal has 18-month-old twin daughters, and although she notes “I started this book long before I was pregnant,” she was writing and editing throughout her pregnancy and in the early days of motherhood.

“I do believe ‘write what you know,’” she says, “but [writers] shouldn’t take that too literally. What you know is emotional truth.

“Writers are magpies, so the things that appear in [their] novels are something you saw in someone’s room at university, or a pen you really liked, or a restaurant you go to a lot, or a comment you overheard at a dinner party. You’re not revealing your soul.

“I can put my hand on my heart and say this isn’t about me. It’s about other people who I care about but are so separate.

When Segal talks about her characters it is clear that to her they are real people — people she has spent the past five years observing, talking to, arguing with.

She tells me the end was as much a surprise to her as to her readers.

“One of the exciting things about writing, for me, is following a story to find out what happens. I wasn’t trying to push it; when you try to push these things, the characters push back in my experience. [The ending] is just what happened when I got there.”

 

Both of Julia’s partners in the book are Jewish, although Julia herself is not. Segal says that, again, this wasn’t intentional, it’s “just who they are.”

“I had an American obstetrician coming to life in my head and it made sense that he would be Jewish. But Julia didn’t have to be Jewish as well, in the same way that Adam and Rachel, the protagonists of The Innocents, are.

“A lot of the mixed marriages I know have really lovely relationships; it’s not all the stereotypical tensions that one hears about.

“Julia knows a lot and is engaged with Jewish life but can be other — and that’s OK.”

Being Jewish is “a big part” of Segal’s life, “certainly a big part of my identity,” and she describes herself as “Reform through and through.”

However she is not currently a member of a specific shul, having just returned to the UK after living in America for two and a half years — Segal was in New York for work and Gabriel was in Boston until she moved to Boston to join him — and then spending a month in South Korea, where he was also working.

She’s weighing up her synagogue options she tells me, which is “OK for now. I wouldn’t say that I’m in a particularly active [religious] phase in my life at the moment but I do feel these things ebb and flow. I feel very emotionally connected but I’m not a regular shul goer.”

It’s too early to know if The Awkward Age will be as successful as The Innocents, which won several awards including the Costa Award for a first novel and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature as well as being longlisted for the 2013 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

“It was different this time,” she says. “Last time I had a beautiful, terrifying freedom of not knowing if it would be published so there’s a real privilege of unselfconsciousness that comes with that.

“This time, I had a publisher waiting. I knew that people would read it so it was a new exercise in learning to eject all those critics from my office and be alone again.”

Before writing her own novel, Segal reviewed debut fiction for The Observer. Did this help her as a writer?

“The most important thing I learned writing that column was how many first novels are published. I used to get a Santa sack of novels each month, so I had this visual reminder.

“The lesson I took from this was ‘wait until you have something exploding out of you’; the world definitely needs more novels but not mediocre novels. I was aware I didn’t want to write for the sake of writing.”

 

‘The Awkward Age’ by Francesca Segal is published by Chatto and Windus