?book review: i feel bad about my neck by nora ephron

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??In Nora Ephron’s latest collection of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck she leads us to believe that when a woman hits fifty, it’s pretty much over. As if a switch had been hit. Overnight, women who were alluring and full of life one day, are suddenly wearing signs pasted to their foreheads that say, “It’s Over.” For screenwriter, director and author Nora Ephron, being invisible is only the first step in a series of hilarious and poignant humiliations.
“But consider the alternative,” she says as she launches into a description of every face cream and magic potion in her bathroom cabinet that has been met with disappointment. “Every so often I read a book about age, and whoever’s writing it says it’s great to be old. It’s great to be wise and sage and mellow; it’s great to be at the point where you understand just what matters in life. I can’t stand people who say things like this. What can they be thinking? Don’t they have necks?……
“If I pass a mirror, I avert my eyes. If I must look into it, I begin by squinting, so that if anything really bad is looking back at me, I am already halfway to closing my eyes to ward off the sight. And if the light is good (which I hope it’s not), I often do what so many women my age do when stuck in front of a mirror: I gently pull the skin of my neck back and stare wistfully at a younger version of myself.”
Many of the essays in this collection have appeared in other publications at various times including Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, The New York Times, O At Home, O, The Magazine, and Vogue. Using the self-deprecating tone Ephron is known for, she takes us along on her ride of self effacement. She hates her neck, her handbag, having to spend seventy-five percent of her time on physical maintenance, her inability to see the way she did when she was twenty, the inability to look the way she did when she was 30. Parenting is over and so there is the empty nest to consider. She has had to move to the East Side from the Apthorp on West 79 St., and as if all that were not enough, she was the only intern JFK did not make a pass at. There’s lot’s of kvetching, and then, the book takes a much needed right hand turn, straight into real longing.
In the last four essays, “The Lost Strudel” (her version of Proust’s Madeline), “On Rapture” (why reading a book is far more interesting than talking to ordinary people), “What I Wish I’d Known” (snippets of hard won advice), and in “Considering the Alternative” (she tackles loss and our cultural aversion to talking about death), Ms. Ephron takes us deeper and reveals a vulnerability that is heartrending in its honesty and its pain. It is the part of the book that is finally schtick-free, and as a result, stronger and funnier.
At its heart, I Feel Bad About My Neck is a collection of essays about loss; the loss of youth, beauty, health, sexuality, power and relevance, and finally, the loss of friends. Although she masks her pain by her extraordinary wit, we empathize with her, we see ourselves in her, and for many, we see where we are headed. This is not a book for women “of a certain age” who need to laugh at what might otherwise make us cry. It is a book for all women. Ms. Ephron is the girlfriend or eccentric aunt we know and trust and have turned to, knowing that she will make us laugh at all the things we’ve otherwise wanted to cry about. We love her because she says what we only have the courage to think.
It’s true that Nora Ephron has created her own formula in her essays and films. But she is a skilled writer with a lot to say, and if the shoe fits……After all, telling the truth through humor is a gift. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, “If you want to tell someone the truth, you had better make him laugh.” Whatever your age, Nora Ephron’s latest collection of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck, will make you laugh out loud, and will break your heart.
–­Joan Zandell
I Feel Bad About My Neck is available at all local bookstores.