Book #34: I Feel Bad About my Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Title: I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman


Author: Nora Ephron


When I was a kid, I read all of the Anne of Green Gables books over a few weeks. When I started out, Anne was twelve years old, and just a few days later, she was the mother of teenagers. When I finished the last book, I cried and cried. Not because the book was sad, but because I felt like Anne had gone through her whole life span in what, for me, was just a few weeks.


Earlier this summer, I read Nora Ephron's Heartburn. In the novel, based very closely on the demise of her marriage to Carl Bernstein, she's a thirty-something woman about to give birth to her second child. In I Feel Bad About My Neck, she's a sixty-something woman whose children are all grown up, musing on botox and exercise and how often she should wash her hair.


Reading I Feel Bad About my Neck gave me the same feeling as I had when reading all of the Anne books so many years ago. In Heartburn, Ephron is my contemporary. In I Feel Bad About my Neck, she's my mother. She's funnier than my mother, but still, she's my mom's contemporary, not mine. I wouldn't call this "thoughts on being a woman" but rather, "thoughts on being a woman of a certain age." Still, she's riotously funny, and the book reads like a breeze.


--originally published 7/29/07