Erich Segal

When I was about 15 or 16, I read several of Erich Segal's books: Love Story; Man, Woman and Child; The Class; Doctors. I remembered how much I liked his books when I saw the movie Masoom again recently. Masoom or Innocence in Hindi was based on his book Man, Woman and Child. I hated Masoom's ending, despite loving everything else about the movie, the actors, the songs, the Indian upper middle class setting. At 16, I was convinced that the acceptance of the child into the family was another benign soft-pressure for the woman to forgive the man, do what is right for him. In the book, Sheila Beckwith, leaves her husband and, at 16 in India, I knew that was the smart thing to do.

Now, as a mother of three, Shabana Azmi's character's change of heart moved me beyond words. I have changed. That the hurt wife would set aside her feelings, come around to putting the child's needs before her own hurt and anger, feels like the right thing to do, Indian or not. Whether I myself will do so if I am in such a situation, I don't know. But it feels like a worthy human characteristic to think about.

So, I talked my daughter into reading Erich Segal's books. After some persuasion, she tried Love Story. She liked it, is all she would say. Wouldn't bother with saying more, my teenager. Then this summer, she read Doctors because she is trying to rule in or rule out medicine for a career. She loved it! Enough to give me in writing what she thought about it. Now she is halfway through The Class.

Doctors was an entertaining and informing read for me. I connected with and sympathized with almost all of the characters. My one critique is that each of the four main characters that Erich Segal focused on had some kind of conclusive happiness, except for Bennett, sadly. He had worked extremely hard all of his life and had had to push through a lot of conflict, but even after the unexpected unfortunate situation that forced him to have to change his well-deserved career, there wasn’t any kind of satisfying conclusion to his story. Barney noticed that Bennett was extremely unhappy and lonely and soon after that, Bennett found out that his father died. But there wasn’t anything else about Bennett in the book.

Overall Doctors did push me toward the field of medicine, although I was turned off by the fact that none of the doctors seem to ever get enough sleep. Still, I appreciated being able to learn more about psychiatry, pediatrics, internal medicine, medical research, surgery, and gynecologist. I gained a more accurate understanding of medical school and residencies. Barney and Laura were very impressive and inspiring to me, seeing as how Barney wrote a book, Laura researched at the NIH, and both became faculty members at medical schools in New York City.

 -- Lekha Durai, July 14 ,2020