I Feel Bad About My Neck, And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron

Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.ĭon’t cover a couch with anything that isn’t more or less beige.ĭon’t buy anything that is 100 percent wool even if it seems to be very soft and not particularly itchy when you try it on in the store. Maslin, Janet “Oh, the Indignity: Nora Ephron Confronts Aging and Other New York Battles,” The New York Times.

You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t if it had a neck.” Ephron advises her reader to start hiding that neck at the age of 43 and notes that her own friends often dress like “a white ladies’ version of the Joy Luck Club.” As she explains it: “Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth.

At 34, continue for nine more years to show off, and then it’s over. “If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini and don’t take it off until you’re 34,” she instructs in the confiding, busybody tone that comes so entertainingly to her. But she retains an uncanny ability to sound like your best friend, whoever you are, even when she is describing the death of her own best friend in a sobering piece called “Considering the Alternative.” When, in the end, she has no better way to ward off mortality than staying silky smooth by using the right bath oil, a certain guilty, pampered segment of the reading public will know exactly what she means. Ephron unavoidable subjects for contemplation: age, loss and vanity. Book of the Month: I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron (2006) Critical Evaluation

I Feel Bad About My Neck, And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron