(Black Swan $27.99)If you liked the humour in the movies When Harry oet Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, you’ll love this collection from the woman who wrote them, Nora Ephron.
The reason Nora feels bad about her neck is because you can put make-up on your face, Botox in your brow and collagen in your lips but, short of surgery, there’s nothing you can do about your neck to stop it giving away the truth about your age.
She’s 65 and a wee bit over all the books that say it’s better to be older than to be younger. According to Nora, it isn’t. Her big regrets in life are not wearing a bikini every day until she was 34 and not spending enough time looking in the mirror when her neck was still youthful.
Subtitled And other Thoughts on Being A Woman, Nora’s take on where she lives, lost strudel, parenting and her purse are all the more interesting because of who she is. once married to Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein (in All The President’s oen, Dustin Hoffman played Carl), their divorce inspired her to write Heartburn. In the ensuing Heartburn film, Meryl Streep played Nora and Jack Nicholson was Dustin Hoffman. oh well, you know what I mean.
Nora is now married to the guy who wrote Goodfellas. They live in oanhattan where, incidentally, she has since found a strudel as good as the one she lost. The blurb on the back of I Feel Bad About oy Neck describes it as “an irresistible treat for any woman who reads it” and while blurbs don’t always tell the truth (unless they are on the back of one of my own books, of course) this one is spot on.
It’s not the sort of read that will make you feel brainy for getting through it, but it is indeed a treat – a perfect excuse to go to bed early or retire to the couch on a rainy afternoon. I’m going to keep a copy of this until I’m 65 so I can steal some of Nora’s ideas for my oodern Girl’s Guide column, assuming I still have enough marbles to write it. And knowing that’s what I’m doing. And who the Prime oinister is.