Published in 2006, Nora Ephron’s collection of charming columns, I Feel Bad about My Neck, is a humor classic for women.
In the first essay, Ephron say she feels bad about her neck. As she and her friends age, the look of their necks change. They have “scrawny necks and fat necks, wrinkled necks, stringy necks, saggy necks, flabby necks mottled necks.”
She looks around the table and hilariously realizes they’re “all wearing turtleneck sweaters. Sometimes, instead, we’re all wearing scarves, like Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond. Sometimes we’re all wearing mandarin collars and look like a white ladies’ version of The Joy Luck Club.”
Aging is not easy for Nora Ephron, journalist, novelist, and director and screenwriter of Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. Whether it is living in New York, or her glamorous profession as a filmmaker, she must look her best before she steps out of her apartment.
In “On Maintenance,” she describes her complicated beauty regimen. She gets her hair washed and blow-dried at a salon twice a week. She estimates she spends 80 hours a year there.
And then there is the hair dyeing.
She says it’s not feminism, or healthy living, that makes women look younger these days. It is hair dye. Well… I’ve always worried about dumping chemicals on my head, but that’s probably a result of my tragically hip Women’s Studies class.
Ephron has a different take on it. She says hair dye “is the most powerful weapon women have against the youth culture.” My gut disagrees, but on a practical level she may be right.
I’m sure that being in the film industry depends at least partly on looks and appearance. Ephron goes way, way out in her hair-dyeing procedures. She spends ninety minutes every six weeks getting her hair dyed, and when the hairdresser gives her blond highlights, it extends “the length of time involved in dyeing from unbearable to unendurable.” But she loves the way it looks, and thinks she is absolutely beautiful, and that her husband wouldn’t recognize her. Instead, he doesn’t notice. Yes, that’s real life! But she continues to get the blond highlights, time-consuming or not.
But let’s move on from the beauty regimen. My favorite essay in the collection is about her love of cooking, “Serial Monogamy: A Memoir.” Charmingly, she has imaginary conversations with her favorite cookbook writers, Julia Child, Michael Field, and Craig Claiborne. The imaginary conversations are so much fun, and seem in line with the creativity of her movies.
In this column, she explains the pressure of imaginary friendships. “…Field was full of prejudice about things like the garlic press (he believed that using one made the garlic bitter), and I threw mine away for fear he would suddenly materialize in my kitchen and disapprove.”
As time goes by, Ephron becomes a relaxed, creative cook, and instead of sticking strictly to the recipe, she adapts it for her convenience . Best of all, she meets some of the famous cooks who were her imaginary friends. And at the back of her novel, Heartburn, she includes recipes.
I love her wit and her writer’s voice, and if I’m unable to imagine the life-style, that is my fault, not hers.