Getting It Right: Lore Segal Talks About 'Half the Kingdom' Lore Segal published her first novel in 1964. "Other People's Houses" was a semi-autobiographical story about a young girl growing up in England after Hitler took control of Austria. When Ms. Segal was 10 years old, she left Vienna for England as part of the Kindertransport program. She moved to New York in 1951. In her new novel, "Half the Kingdom," older hospital patients are mysteriously contracting Alzheimer's disease at a rapid rate. In The New York Times Book Review, Patricia T. O'Conner wrote: "Fans of Segal's fiction should feel right at home in this darkly comic novel." In a recent e-mail interview, Ms. Segal, 85, discussed what the book says about aging, the recurring characters in her fiction, whether she ever thinks of retiring and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation: "Half the Kingdom" is set mostly in a hospital where patients seem to be "catching" Alzheimer's from one another. What inspired this idea? I have a sneaking suspicion that the fine, funny phrase "catching" dementia comes from one of my reviewers. I was thinking about the inevitable sadness that we bless modern medicine for giving us an additional 10, 20 years of life, and curse it for giving us 10, 20 additional years in which to lose our faculties. Do you mean for the novel to say anything specifically about what it means to be old or hospitalized in America now? Novels want to be specific. My characters are old, and hospitalized in America now, but when Ida longs to put her hand inside her skull to get at the word she can't remember - as I do - it's not because of the radical insufficiency of our health care system. It is the fate of the human mind - "how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty" - to be liable to catastrophic deterioration. For a relatively short novel, it features a large cast of characters. Was any character particularly difficult to write? Once a character has acquired a body and a voice, she'll take care of who she is. What is difficult for me is to write action. I seem to have a reluctance to make things happen. Are all of the characters with recognizable names from previous books supposed to be exactly those same characters in old age? What appeals to you about revisiting the same people from book to book? Wasn't K the protagonist to whom all of Kafka's novels happen? So I've got my Ilka, and Joe and Jenny, and the rest. Is Ilka consistent with her earlier self? In "Her First American," young Ilka Weissnix was Ilka Knownothing, and being Jewish among her black friends, perhaps also Ilka Notquitewhite. At seventy-five, she is Ilka Weiss who knows the losses and - believe it! - the enjoyments of age. In the acknowledgments, you thank friends who read the book "through its several changes." How radical were those changes? Was the book originally going to look or sound very different from how it ended up? My good readers opened new avenues for me: Dr. Lizzie R. questioned my imaginary doctors discussing their imaginary patients with other patients, which led me to have my fun with the privacy policies we all sign without reading. There was one radical change: I originally conceived of Joe Bernstine's 57th Street office as the Homeland (joke) Agency tracking terrorist activity. Despite a year's research, I could not write it believably. My friend James M. suggested changing it to a research venture, which is within my scope. It was an important example of good editing. You taught writing for many years before retiring in 1996. What do you miss most about teaching? I'm still teaching a course at the 92nd Street Y. I teach it in my living room, with a bottle or two of wine. It's been said that your books differ very much from one to the next. Do you believe they do? And if so, how intentional is that? Intentional? I'm reminded of Robert Motherwell's plaintive answer to a critic's question: "All I want is to get it right." When did writing in English begin to feel like an unconscious process for you, if it ever did? Do you still feel as though you're writing in a second language? I came to England on a "Children's Transport." By the end of six weeks, those of us placed with foster families who spoke no German had become English speakers. Today I still speak a 10-year-old's German. When I've read or given a talk in Vienna, I made sure someone in the audience could throw me the right word. I've thought of having someone these days to throw me the names I can't remember. You once said in an interview, "I don't have the long breath required to think in terms of a novel." Given that you believe this, how have you written novels? I was thinking of the making of "Other People's Houses," which was originally written in chapters serialized in The New Yorker, the way Dickens's and Henry James's novels were serialized. The concept of the chapters of "Other People's Houses" was thematic and only secondarily chronological. There is a sense in which all my books are written on some such principle, except for "Her First American," and that took me eighteen years. Two of your peers, Philip Roth and Alice Munro, recently made public declarations that they are retiring from writing fiction. Do you ever think of stopping? I can't imagine doing another novel, but I've been writing seven days a week for the last seventy years, and what would I do with my hands, mornings from eight to one? And won't some thing that I think, or see, or hear turn itself into words?