by Francesca Segal, daughter of Erich Segal
Romantic, witty, astringent, simple, devastating, and every bit as fresh now, Love Story came out in 1970, ten years before I was born. And so I missed the first furore. I missed the tens of millions of paperbacks, the largest ever hardback reprint runs, and I missed the four-block lines, the record-breaking box office figures, the devoted, sobbing fans across the world - Tokyo to Tennessee, London to Lagos - when the movie came out later that same year. I missed almost all of the fourteen years in which Jennifer was the United States’ most popular name for baby girls. Love Story touched America, and allow the jaded to believe, again, in love.
In understanding its historical context it’s vital to remember what a different era it was - long before the Internet, and nearly four decades before the phrase ‘going viral” had entered the lexicon.
Love Story did precisely that. Only the Beatles had swept the world in quite that way, till then. It was translated into thirty-three languages. One in every five Americans had read the book - a simple love affair between Harvard hockey star Oliver Barrett IV and the wise-cracking working class music scholar Jenny Cavilleri.
For writing 131 pages of fiction my father become world famous - beloved by the reading public, pilloried by an envious academic community who believed that professors ought not to venture into popular culture. And I missed it all. But I know the novel, and I was lucky enough to know its extraordinary author. My father was such a gentle man, and as a result he wrote an innocent, tender novel. It has his heart and soul and honesty and humour, and that combination, rarer than it should be, is alchemical.
He was thirty when he sat down, one frigid, snow-silenced winter break in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to write the book you now hold. He was a young, dynamic young profe4ssor of Classiccs and Comparative Literature at Yale and he had just heard that a former student of his from Harvard had lost his wife to cancer at twenty-five..
My father, only a few years older and still grieving the death of his own father, was consumed by the story.
Jennyand Oliver meet. They fall in love, but their parents disapprove. Jenny dies and breaks Oliver’s heart, and ours. For its audacious simplicity, Le Monde called it the novel “that no one dared to write, but everyone was waiting to read”. America in 1970 was wounded, rent in two by the prolonged struggleof the Vietnam War. The cinema of that year was violent; erotic: cynical. Martin Luther King, Jr was dead. A gulf had opened between generations that seem unbridgeable - Republican fathers who had proudly served their country in the Second World War, or in Korea, could not understand their long-haired hippie children who tore draft cards, protested against the war and rejected their parents ‘ bourgeoisie. “Silence like a cancer grows,” Simon and Garfield had sung after JFK’s assassination, and it was silence and alienation that grew between fathers and sons across America.
In Love Story, it is Jenny’s values that predominate - above all, honour thy parents. It is a love story that is really two stories - the first between a man and a woman, the second between a father and his son. That reconciliation, Oliver brought back by grief into the solace of his father’s arms, was the secret hope of fathers and sons across America.