Elisa Segrave

I was interested to read the letter from Marion Glastonbury, who, like me, has a son with Asperger’s Syndrome (Letters, 31 October). She questions ‘with due tentativeness’ whether my son Nicholas’s intuitive remarks about my mother’s childhood might simply be the result of five years of psychotherapy – he gave this up 18 months ago – and ‘some advanced echolalia’, whereby the Asperger’s...

Elisa Segrave writes: I’m not anti-semitic in the drawing-room, or anywhere else for that matter, and I do not make things up, though I was mistaken in saying that Mrs Rosen had travelled in Europe during the war rather than the Fifties. As for Victor Menza (Letters, 6 June), he wasn’t even at the supper which I describe. I already apologised to Judith over a month ago for having unaccountably...

Mary Beard’s review of my book The Diary of a Breast (LRB, 6 July) is complimentary and thought-provoking and I thank her for this, but her phrase ‘designer cancer’ is demeaning. If my book had been published posthumously, would she have still used these words? A life-threatening illness is not about fashion. I have survived, but many other women, who started with the same symptoms as I had,...

Andrew O’Hagan’s Diary (LRB, 11 March) brought some note of honesty and reality to the sad death of the little boy in Liverpool. I myself remember torturing one of my brothers, four years younger than me, whom I adored, by putting him in a cage of chicken wire and feeding him rotten walnuts. (I was seven.) Seeing on television the adults going berserk and trying to storm the van containing the...