Ephron wins by a 'Neck'

Lynn Bronikowski, Special to the News

Friday, August 4, 2006

I Feel Bad About My Neck, in which Nora Ephron chronicles her life, her looks and the aging process, is the kind of book you want to buy for all your baby-boomer girlfriends as they dread their next birthdays.

Her little book of essays is indeed a gift - rich with laughs and comforting in its reflections on everything from hair dye, "the most powerful weapon older women have against the youth culture," to reading glasses: "I bought six pair of them last week on sale and sprinkled them throughout the house, yet none of them is visible. Where are they?"

Above all, the woman who brought us such screenplays as When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail and the best sellers Heartburn, Scribble Scribble and Crazy Salad is daringly truthful. Let's face it - growing old is crummy.

Ephron loathes the many books written for older women that she characterizes as "uniformly upbeat and full of bromides and homilies about how pleasant life can be once one is free from all the nagging obligations of children, monthly periods and, in some cases, full-time jobs."

"I find these books utterly useless. . . . Why do people write books that say it's better to be older than younger? It's not better."

Ephron opens with "I Feel Bad About My Neck."

"The neck starts to go at forty-three, and that's that," the 65-year-old author observes. "Short of surgery, there's not a damn thing you can do about a neck. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut a redwood tree open to see how old it is, but you wouldn't have to if it had a neck."

She goes on with equal surety about lotions and potions meant to stop the clock, musing over an expensive anti-aging cream slipped to her at the cosmetics counter by a woman who "behaved as if she were slipping me a bottle of aged whiskey during Prohibition."

"It had just come in, she whispered. It was down in the basement. They couldn't put it out on display, or it would be gone in a twinkling. Only certain customers were being allowed to buy it."

Ephron takes on exercise, waxing, hair highlights, manicures and pedicures with equal anguish - all part of what she calls "maintenance."

Even purses aren't spared as she declares, "I hate my purse." She deems it a reflection of "negligent housekeeping, hopeless disorganization, a chronic inability to throw anything away, and an ongoing failure to handle the obligations of a demanding and difficult accessory (the obligation, for example, that it should in some way match what your wearing.)"

Among her hilarious observations on aging, Ephron weaves flashbacks to her less-than- glamorous days as an intern at the Kennedy White House. "I am probably the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House that the president did not make a pass at," she says.

She then flashes ahead 40 years to the Clinton White House, which she observed from afar. She admits to falling in and out of love with Clinton, depending on what he was up to. For example, she quite piercingly blames him for the Unites States' being at war.

"If Bill had behaved, Al would have been elected, and thousands and thousands of people would be alive today who are instead dead," she surmises.

Just as sobering are her reflections on the death of her best friend by cancer and the conversations she wishes they'd had. Ephron is more melancholy than morbid about "the eventuality." But she knows one thing for sure: She wants champagne to be served at the reception after her funeral because "it's so festive."

Cheers to her! And never mind the neck - there are always turtlenecks.

Lynn Bronikowski is a freelance writer living in Denver.