Francesca Segal's portrait of her father, Erich

Erich Segal, author of the best-selling romance novel Love Story (1970), died aged 72 in London on Sunday after suffering from Parkinson’s disease for 25 years. He taught classics at Yale University, and continued to do so after becoming a succcessful novelist. He held visiting professorships at Princeton, Oxford and the University of London.

His daughter Francesca Segal was eighteen months old when her father was diagnosed, and never knew him without the illness. In her attempt to reconcile the father she knew with the one that had gone before, she went in search of his past - to the Brooklyn neigbourhood where he grew up. Her article on the experience appeared in Granta 104: Fathers, and is free to read online.