Review: I Feel Bad About My Neck

Wouldn’t that be a horrible title for a play or a movie? Imagine if it were a musical! But I digress.

I Feel Bad About My Neck is a book. It’s comprised of columns and musings from the humorous mind of Nora Ephron, best known as the screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally and other films.

Ephron is 65 and like just about anyone over the age of 30, shocked to find herself at that age. The title comes from a funny piece about how Ephron now realizes she took her youthful and attractive neck for granted, never thought about it really, until it began to pucker and sag and now all she thinks about is covering it up. She wears turtlenecks year round!

Ephron writes about living in New York and children and marriage (she’s had 3) and other somewhat ordinary aspects of life, from the vantage point of someone who knows more now than she used to, and still knows nothing at all about some things.

I’m a sucker for self-deprecation. Any SNL guest host who sends up their image in a skit wins me over. I also respect authenticity and honesty and the ability that some people have (too few, in my opinion) to get past whatever prejudices and worries and phobias they have to speak the truth. In Ephron’s case, the truth is about getting older and she tells it in a dry, funny way.

At the brief book’s end, Ephron writes of her gratitude to those who have worked tirelessly to recapture her youthful appearance and admits that after all of their efforts, she now looks exactly one year younger than she is. I laughed out loud. And that’s the theme of I Feel Bad About My Neck; we may as well laugh about aging because there’s nothing else we can really do about it. Besides, it beats the alternative!