Fri 18 Aug 2006
In her first book of new essays in three decades, writer and film director Nora Ephron tackles the comic indignities of growing older and women’s attempts to stop the aging process in “I Feel Bad About My Neck, And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman” (Knopf, 137 pp., $20).
Starting with the title essay (”I feel bad about my neck,” it begins. “Truly I do. If you saw my neck you might feel bad about it too.”), Ephron moves on to “I Hate My Purse,” which chronicles the insanity of purses stuffed with the wreckage of life.
From there, with sharp self-parody, Ephron covers her addiction to hair coloring, her brutal beauty-maintenance regimen, her 20-year romance with a cheap rental apartment in Manhattan and a wry list of things she should have known, including, “The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money.”
Beneath the comedy, Ephron addresses such serious topics as finding true romance in her 40s. Her last essay, “Considering the Alternative,” is a moving take on death and friends lost.