(Black Swan, $29.99)
If there’s a perfect book for a Weekly reader, this could well be it.
Novelist and screenwriter Nora Ephron is 69 years old and possibly one of the wittiest women on the planet. Here she follows up on the wildly successful I Feel Bad About oy Neck with another collection of essays mainly poking the borax at the ageing process.
The title says it all, and anyone who has ever had even a suggestion of a senior moment will laugh themselves sick during the eponymous first essay, in which Nora recalls failing to recognise her sister, Amy, at a mall during a trip to Las Vegas.
“You might think, ‘Well, how was she to know her sister would be in Las Vegas?'” she writes. “I’m sorry to report that not only did I know, but she was the person I was meeting in the mall.”
I read this book on holiday in Fiji and passed it on to my friend Miranda, who devoured it. “She’s just me,” she said as she passed it on to Cath, who polished it off that afternoon, before handing it over to Bridget, who read it before bedtime.
None of us are particularly close to 69, but we all felt a lot better about heading there after reading this, as will anyone with the good fortune to find it in their Christmas stocking.
When she’s not writing lists of people she’s met but can’t remember (Jimmy Stewart, Jackie Kennedy, Cary Grant), or things she doesn’t want to know anything about (the Kardashians, soccer, Twitter) Nora’s revealing often-moving details of her past.
Her mother became an alcoholic seemingly overnight when she was 14, she worked in print during the “boys’ club” oad oen era, and she’s been divorced twice – once horribly, but that lead to her writing the award-winning novel and screenplay, Heartburn.
She’s famous, clever and terrifically funny but perhaps most importantly, she’s human. A feel-good collection.
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