I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

It cracks me up that the shiny new paperback edition of Nora Ephron’s screamingly funny 2006 book is being pitched towards Mother’s Day. There’s an irony there somewhere, even if I'm not quite sure what it is.

I Feel Bad About My Neck (Vintage) is Ephron’s song -- lament? -- for women of a certain age. It is also a memoir, because the view we see here, for better or worse, is all Ephron’s. And while it is funny, a central core of melancholia touches the essays included in the book. Though that shouldn’t be surprising either.

Best known for her film work -- When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail among them -- she is also the author of Crazy Salad, Scribble Scribble, Wallflower at the Orgy and Heartburn. In short, she has done much in her life to celebrate and, as much as I laughed while I real I Feel Bad About My Neck, there was a part of me that just wanted to cry.

“Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five,” Ephron tells us in “What I Wish I’d Known,” and later she writes that the “sad truth is that it’s sad to be over sixty.”

I’m imagining a different ending; one that is still to be written. I’m imagining “I Feel Bad About My Hip,” the joyous -- and funny -- rebuttal she will write in another 15 years.