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by erin thursby
scopes1925@msn.com
Nora Ephron’s book, I Feel Bad About My Neck And Other Thoughts On Being a Woman, has struck enough of a nerve with readers that it’s rocketed up to the New York Times Best Seller List. Most books about growing older focus on all the “positives” but Nora Ephron blithely explores all the negatives. Somehow, it isn’t depressing because Ephoron frames all her complaints humorously and it’s reassuring to know that other people have gone through the vagaries of aging. Each chapter can stand alone because most have been published as articles. They make for a quick read, and not all of them are focused on aging.
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She starts her complaints with a chapter on the neck. Most women over forty will be able to easily relate when Ephron declares that “short of surgery, there’s not a damn thing you can do about a neck. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to if it had a neck.” Even if you’ve got quite a few years to go before you “feel bad” about your neck, Ephron is a fun and witty read.
The chapter ‘Blind as a Bat’ covers the never-ending search for the reading glasses she has sprinkled about the house and all the things she can’t read without them. ‘Considering the Alternative’ gets a little more serious than most of the book, delving into the reality of facing death as you get older.
She bemoans the time it takes to maintain her look, griping merrily about how it takes more and more time to keep herself looking decent. Hair, hair dye, nails, unwanted hair, exercise and skin care all must be maintained so she doesn’t end up looking like a bag lady. Hair, as far as Ephron is concerned, is the most troublesome of the lot: “We begin, I’m sorry to say, with hair. I’m sorry to say it because the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair any more is the secret upside of death.”
I related to the chapter entitled ‘I Hate My Purse’ in which the author comments on a purse culture that encourages thousands of dollars to be spent on a purse. I, like the author, avoided carrying a purse for years because of all the flotsam that ends up in a purse and all the trouble involved in matching a purse to match my outfit. Her solution to the purse dilemma was to buy an extremely tacky purse, emblazoned with the taxi cab yellow and royal blue image of a New York City MetroCard: “It matches nothing at all and therefore, on a deep level, matches everything.”
Despite her involvement in Hollywood, Ephron is a New Yorker to the core and she fondly tells stories about the New York that was. She latches on to the one constant about the City: everything changes. While you live there change is part of the pulse of the city and you feel like an insider, but when you come back, you feel betrayed because everything you thought you knew has changed.
She tells of her various relationships with the food gods of New York (imagined and otherwise). “Just before I moved to New York,” writes Ephron, “two historic events had occurred: the birth control pill had been invented and the first Julia Child cookbook was published. As a result, everyone was having sex, and when sex was over, you cooked something.” She speaks with authority and nostalgia on Pearl’s, the famous NY Chinese restaurant where only the famous could score a meal: “If you did get a table, you remembered the meal forever because there was so much MSG in the food that you were awake for years afterward.”
Ephron is generally funny and barely profound, but she writes of truths that are impossible to ignore once you’ve noticed them. She skips from subject to subject in this pithy collection of essays, always managing to be entertaining even when she’s speaking of life at its most trivial.
Her articles have appeared in Vogue and The New Yorker (among others). She is best known for penning the screenplay of When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and later You’ve Got Mail, which she co-wrote with her sister. She has also directed a number of romantic comedies, many of which she wrote the screenplay for.
She’s been married three times. Her second marriage, to Carl Bernstein (who was one of the reporters to break the Watergate story) is notable because she wrote a book about the end of that marriage. Bernstein left her for the wife a British Ambassador while Nora was seven months pregnant with their second child. The resulting book was made into a movie called Heartburn (1986), starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. Despite the box office failure of the movie, Meryl Streep has often cited the title role as her favorite character.
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