PositiveThe Paris ReviewThere are many standouts in the collection, but its single greatest strength is the consistency of Segal’s voice ... This is hallmark Segal: the fascination with memory and its wormy relation to words; the droll admission of error; most of all, the brief, bleak allusion to grief ... She does not write into the feeling of trauma but rather demonstrates through dialogue and action how trauma shapes people. In her fiction, there is rarely interior thought and never commentary; not for her the satisfaction of the self-righteous mot juste. Instead, meaning builds slowly, over many pages: you have to pay attention to understand her subtle irony. This kind of almost anthropological dissection is not in vogue right now; one wonders whether part of why Segal has fallen out of fashion is her refusal of big, splashy emotions, her absolute lack of interest in asserting a fierce, feeling I ... Or perhaps she has fallen out of fashion because she so relentlessly refuses to divide the world into good and evil. In her short stories, which form the bulk of The Journal I Did Not Keep, she focuses not on the monstrously bad but rather on the ordinarily good, the vast majority of us who want to do the right thing but don’t.
