Book Review: I Feel Bad About My Neck

by Nora Ephron

(Knopf, 2006. 137 pp.)

Reviewed by Lauren McKinney, Ph.D

Nora Ephron is funny in this book, as usual. Overall, the author of Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail makes us laugh. Her new book offers an uneven collection of essays, some very short and inconsequential, and others well developed and leisurely in pace. All address being a woman, or aging, or both. (The book is subtitled "And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.") As you’re reading, you get the feeling that had the writer not been the popular Norah Ephron, such a thin collection would barely be publishable. But—it is Nora Ephron, and that makes all the difference.

Ephron has a way of splicing this nonfiction collection together with melancholia on the one hand, and beauty tips on the other. A sense of loss is paired with a celebration of black turtlenecks. The dark edges of Nora Ephron’s psyche are showing, which gives this otherwise lightweight book enough ballast for it to have staying power. (And, at 137 pages, it is literally lightweight.)

Ephron’s longest and most well-developed essay, one that appeared in The New Yorker, is "Moving On," about her favorite apartment building in New York. It’s a delightful read about a charming New York, the almost Bohemian city that so many writers live in or pretend to live in. Another essay, "Serial Monogamy: A Memoir," and my personal favorite, chronicles her devotion to one cookbook author after another, from the late 1950s until now. From Julia Child to Nigella Lawson, Ephron traces her culinary influences. She tells how they always informed or changed her style, in seemingly trivial ways that assume significance after a few decades. At one point in the 1960s, she has dinner at the food writer Lee Bailey’s place. There, she is convinced that her life until this point has been gaudy and tasteless, and that she needs to get a divorce immediately. Ephron is skilled at showing how galvanizing a new style can be when you’re in the doldrums of habit and routine.

Surely all women will relate to "I Hate My Purse." Here is where Ephron’s mother’s advice, "Everything is copy," really pays. Ephron thinks this adage means that if you preemptively tell someone your failings, you are ahead of the game because then they can’t point them out to you. In "I Hate My Purse," she wards off any possibility that one of her readers will spot her at a book signing, rifling through a messy disaster of a purse to look for a tissue. Instead, the reader will laugh and say, "So your purse really IS a black hole full of trash!" and emit a good-natured chuckle. It is a relief to know that even Nora Ephron struggles over the banal maintenance issues shared by those of us who don’t live in Manhattan and write screenplays.

Speaking of maintenance, Ephron’s essay "On Maintenance" describes the numerous rituals and products that make her skin softer, her hair darker, her face smooth, and nails glamorous. In short, implements in her war with aging, which, she reckons, in addition to the money, costs her about eight hours a week. And, in keeping with the purse revelations, she admits to having in her youth inadvertently hoarded many jars of Jolen crème bleach hair lightener in her bathroom vanity because she kept forgetting she already had a jar before buying another. As in the purse essay, Ephron is adept at simply and unapologetically cataloguing the secret mundane life of modern, and always aging, American women.

In "The Three Stages of Parenting," Ephron says wryly to her empty-nesting peers, "If you find yourself nostalgic for the ongoing day-to-day activities required of the modern parent, there’s a solution. Get a dog." It’s a mostly positive and clear-eyed presentation of the empty-nesting stage.

Ephron’s last and most melancholy piece, "Considering the Alternative," ends the collection. I find that I’m much more willing to let a writer’s sadness move me when she has just made me laugh. It’s as if the laughter empties me of anxiety and leaves me ready to hear the writer’s sorrow. All I know is that when I put down I Feel Bad About My Neck, I know that Nora Ephron is a true girlfriend. If only she hadn’t left out one important detail: her telephone number.

Lauren McKinney, Ph.D, is a freelance writer living in Swarthmore, PA. Although of empty-nesting age, because of a curious twist of fate (she waited a long time for Mr. Right), Lauren is currently raising two young sons. With her nest empty long before it was full, Lauren takes an interest in the aging process but is in no way looking forward to empty nesting.