About book I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being A Woman (2006)
Watching the "in memoriam" montage at the Oscars on Sunday night reminded me that I hadn't yet gotten around to writing about Nora Ephron, one of our country's great writers, who died last year.Ephron was best known as a screenwriter and has been nominated for three Oscars and won a Writers Guild Award. Many of her movies were also incredibly huge hits. She wrote films as intelligent as Silkwood and Julie and Julia and as accessible as Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail. And, of course, she wrote When Harry Met Sally, probably her biggest hit of all time.But she was also a gifted writer of essays and fiction and wrote several books including Heartburn, which was later adapted to a film starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.While driving to see my parents over the holidays this past December, Dave and I finally got around to listening to Ephron's last collection of essays—I Feel Bad about my Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman. It was something I'd been wanting to do ever since it came out in 2008 and had been especially anxious to do since Ephron died last June.Of course, the title of the book refers to the first essay—"I Feel Bad about my Neck"—but it is two of the other essays in this collection that are the most moving and the book's true heart. "Parenting in Three Stages" is a hilarious and poignant look at raising children while "Considering the Alternative" is a masterful contemplation on the meaning of life. These two essays alone make this book a must-read.But, of course, the first essay is the one I want to talk about here.The title gives away that, obviously, this piece is all about the idea that, at a certain age, the neck starts to go. Like the butt and the upper arms and the thighs before them, the neck wilts and withers and eventually dies.As Ephron explains, one day, you wake up and think, "I hate my neck."Ephron claims this change happens in your mid-forties, and she warns women in their thirties to prepare for this impending doom and enjoy their beautiful necks as long as they can.I have been known to offer the same kind of advice to my students and random young twenty-somethings: Just look at yourself, I tell them. You are perfect and beautiful. Your skin is completely free of craggy cellulite and sagging flesh. You should just sit in front of the mirror all day, naked, and appreciate yourself. Honestly I don't know why you'd do anything else.I am 42 years old, and I have to admit that ever since I listened to Ephron's book, I've noticed how long and lovely my own neck still is. How unblemished and smooth and taut it looks. Sometimes I stand in front of the mirror for whole minutes—just appreciating the beauty that is middle-age.And, of course, the irony of this revelation is not lost on me: to women Ephron's age, my neck is a lovely delicate flower, something to behold and appreciate. And to me, my students' bodies are the same way—they are as inspiring and glorious as a flaming sunset on a pristine beach.It reminds me of the importance of perspective.Ephron longed for my neck, I long for the body of a twenty-something, and I'm sure there was something about Ephron that women older than her envied. Was it her full head of hair? Or her slim figure?As for me, I want many things Ephron had: her wisdom, her life experience, her success. In truth, I'd trade a smooth neck for Ephron's accomplishments any day.So I will continue to appreciate my neck until I can no longer do so.I feel it's the least I can do to honor Ephron, a woman who gave us all so much.*Originally published at I Will Not Diet
I listened to the audio book on CD, which is read by the author. That was not the way to go with this one. She has odd inflections and an unnatural reading cadence. For example, she might read like this:We lived (pause)in a white house (pause)and I didn't (pause)like it.Partly because of her reading style and partly because of the content, I had trouble getting into it. It's supposed to be funny but isn't especially. She describes all the "maintenance" older women do to keep up their appearances at great length and talks about these things as if they are mandatory, when in fact, they are not. She is not a person that a poor, blue-collar woman like me who shops at Target can well relate to. At least not at first. For instance, she talks about the agony of sitting at the beauty parlor all day to get her hair colored and how she spends more money on it each year than her first car cost. And I compose an imaginary email to her in my head where I turn her on to the beauty aisle at Long's Drug Store where you can buy a box of color that takes less than half an hour to use for less than $10. Later in the book, however, she rather wins me over. She describes the raptures of getting engrossed in a great novel in a way that I (or you, I bet) could totally relate to. The real world is tedious and seems unreal when you're dying to get back to your book. When she's not talking about shopping, she and I do seem to inhabit the same planet and I can see that she has some wisdom to impart. And I admire her honesty. She mentions all the upbeat chicken-soup-for-the-soul type of books that are out there for older women and says they're full of crap. Being old isn't that great. In this day and age where everyone pretends that whatever age they're at is the new 25, it's refreshing. This might appeal to a woman who is looking for some light nonfiction to read. Do NOT get the audio version, though. I really think it would have been a totally different experience to read it and I probably would have taken to it much more quickly.
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Sitting in a movie theater back in the eighties, not my eighties -- the 1980s, I am smiling, laughing, just having a good ol' time when suddenly TERMS OF ENDEARMENT goes from funny to ominous to dark as turds that can signal upper g.i. bleeding. I'm thinking, "Shit, no, don't take this story there." I'm not walking out of a movie with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson in it; that fact means watching a character who's about my age die of cancer. She's got three young kids; I have one and one baking in the pelvic oven. The film deserves praise, but I AM PISSED. We're way past the 1980s; I look as if I could be eighty, and I turn to Nora Ephron to entertain me. Her work (forget HEARTBURN) usually does, and the first chapter doesn't disappoint me. Most of the middle chapters are forgettable even if you have a terrific memory, so I start to anticipate writing a review that is somewhere between neutral and unfavorable(2 stars). But I reach the essay "The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less," and I find material so closely related to remarks I made just hours ago that -- surprise -- I'm liking this book again. Then with only a few stops left before this train reaches "the end of the line," I smell a "terms-of-endearment" experience on the tracks. Well, not quite. Besides, I'm not young and pregnant; so even if the author leaves me in an unlit underground station, the image of Debra Winger in a hospital bed won't be with me. I am actually GLAD that the final two chapters of the book offer an interesting combination of sunshine and charcoal-gray clouds. And despite my lousy memory, I can hold on to lines such as "The empty nest is underrated"(125); "Never let them know"(126); and "I don't know. I hope that's clear"(136). About that last one -- if Nora Ephron and I knew each other, I'd swear she was quoting me.
—Reese
I have to say I'm a little baffled by Nora Ephron. She was in intern in the JFK White House and had a free pass to roam its halls. She was a reporter at Newsweek in the 1960's, before they even had female reporters. She's been married three times. One of her husbands was Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Bernstein of the Watergate scandal. And when he had an affair it wasn't just with any old woman, but with the wife of the British ambassador to the United States. She's been nominated for three academy awards for screenwriting (Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle). She also directed those films. Her accomplishments are staggering. Impressive for any woman of any era, but harder for her certainly, in those times. The sexism alone she must have faced -- at a hard NY newspaper, in the even harder boys club of Hollywood -- had to have been outrageous. Then why are her essays so flip and shallow? So elitist? Ephron has a dry wit that I find quite pleasing. But the topics? "I Hate my Purse." "I Feel Bad about my Neck." Gah! Vapid and trivial. I mean, this woman should have some shit to say! Too bad she didn't say any of it.
—CC
I have a love-hate relationship with Nora Ephron. On the one hand, she's a Democrat, so I feel a certain allegience with her. I want to like her. Sometimes I actually get what she's saying.Other times I think, can you hear yourself? Is that really what you think? Are you that vapid? She makes a point, a brilliant point, then suddenly punctures it with a denigrating remark - perhaps to keep us from taking her too seriously, perhaps to make us laugh - but it detsroys the momentum and lets us down.So she goes on here about aging when you are rich and famous. I suppose it's meant to be aging for all women, but she clearly has no understanding of how the majority of women live. She had a privileged upbringing and career that has pretty much kept her safely separated from how people making less than $30,000 a year live. Here she describes the pursuit of a grossly expensive handbag, something called eyebrow weaving, an apartment building she used to live in where the rent per month was more than I make in a year, and - of course - necks revealing age as surely as the rings in the stump of a tree.Perhaps it's me. Perhaps I just am not equipped with a sense of humor subtle enough to appreciate her turns of phrase. I mean, I loved When Harry Met Sally, though it was filled with recycled Ephronisms - "pesto is the quiche of the '80s," "thin, pretty, big tits, your basic nightmare." I should love her books. Instead, I love/hate them.
—Barbara Rice
