I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being a Woman (Vintage)

With her disarming, intimate, completely accessible voice, and dry sense of humor, Nora Ephron shares with us her ups and downs in I Feel Bad About My Neck, a candid, hilarious look at women who are getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests, and life itself.

Ephron chronicles her life as an obsessed cook, passionate city dweller, and hapless parent. But mostly she speaks frankly and uproariously about life as a woman of a certain age. Utterly courageous, uproariously funny, and unexpectedly moving in its truth telling, I Feel Bad About My Neck is a scrumptious, irresistible treat of a book, full of truths, laugh out loud moments that will appeal to readers of all ages.

Customer Reviews:

Enough with denial - embrace it ;-)

By Little Miss Cutey - August 2, 2006

I've loved Nora Ephron ever since Sleepless In Seattle and You've Got Mail. Heartburn (which she wrote) turned into a hit film, and so I knew when I saw that she wrote another book again, I thought I'd pick it up. It's a collection of amusing essays all about growing older.
She says that there are so many books out there about what to do after menopause etc, but none addressed your neck change as you age so she thought this was a cute and funny title.
She talks about maintenance being a second career because a lot of women are pre-empting age. For example, hair dying, botox etc. She talks about her husbands theory of women either being birds, muffins or horses and that is the shape of your face. If you are a muffin, you can have a zillion face lifts and be fine, but other shaped faces - not so much.
She talks more seriously about reaching 60 and start loosing friends. You have to come to grips with reality and realise that we aren't invincible and won't die - it's... read more

Witty, clever but leightweight...

By Cynthia K. Robertson - December 15, 2006

Nora Ephron is witty, clever and has her finger on the pulse of American women everywhere in her delightful book, I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman. My only complaint is that at 137 pages (and small pages at that), it's a rather lightweight book.

Ephron writes about so many of the problems we women face: hairstyles, maintenance routines, raising children, empty nesting, reading glasses, cooking, purses, living in New York City, aging, and the death of good friends. Some of her observations are brutally honest. She talks about how a neck is a telltale sign of aging. "The neck is a dead giveaway. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn't have to do that if it had a neck." She has a refreshing list of "What I Wish I'd Known" including "Never marry a man you wouldn't want to be divorced from" and "The empty nest is underrated."

I' m not real big on... read more

WE ARE NOT GETTING OLDER; WE ARE GETTING BETTER...AND MORE TOLERANT OF OURSELVES

By Sandra D. Peters "Seagull Books" - August 5, 2006

I liked this book from start to finish. It is a fairly quick read but filled with an unusual tongue-in-cheek style of wit and humour. After all, we cannot change the aging process, so why not come to terms and make the best of it. I, too, am approaching that big 60 year and as I was reading this book, kept saying to myself, "Yep, that's me!" The book will win the hearts of female readers, especially those who are going through or already beyond the menopausal years. You are bound to find a part of yourself in here somewhere. Growing older may bring a few wrinkles and a lot of things that once worked now leak, creak and squeak, but life is only what you make it. The author has a way of making you feel that growing old is not all that bad after all. You can't recapture youth, but you can get more than a few laughs from this book - go for it!