I did a book blog on Squawk Radio about Nora Ephron’s book a short, breezy Saturday blog that talked about what a fantastically funny, wise book this is. And I still believe that. But in the months since I first read it, I have kept thinking about certain bits of advice. I tried to follow some, with disastrous results. And even more dangerously I started to observe my own body through Nora Ephron’s eyes, and hear her voice in my head. So this review is the entirely genteel argument I’d like to have with Nora Ephron.

Friends and Lies
I Feel Bad About My Neck is a book about a woman’s body as it grows older. Nora Ephron has the balls  and I use that phrase deliberately  to be utterly open about the frustrations of getting old. She starts out by talking about lies: all those lies we tell our friends when they complain about the little pouches under their eyes, or their jowls. We lie, Nora says, because we don’t want a problem solution to be All Our Fault.

On the one hand, I absolutely understand what she’s saying. Who hasn’t listened for months to a friend complain about a lame-brain man she’s slumming with, heard with delight that she is finally thinking of leaving him and told her exactly what you thought of him all along? Only to find on Monday morning that she invited the penniless rat back into her apartment, and there’s a new chill in the air between the two of you?

But here’s the problem: if our dearest friends don’t tell us the truth about our wattles, who will? If we’re stinky with sweat or garlic or lord knows what,  shouldn’t our friends be the ones who tell us? Could someone please tell me if my teeth are looking as yellow as a daisy, or the trough between my brows looks like the Grand Canyon? I need my friends to tell me the truth! So I part ways with Nora here.

Cooking
One chapter revolves around the chef Lee Bailey. Now, as it happens I own every one of his cookbooks. That means somewhere I have a photo of Nora Ephron’s back yard because apparently he used it in a cookbook (he does those cookbooks that waste space with a close-up of a beautiful child or a blue flower). He’s a fabulous cook, even the older books where he’s cooking pork in butter and doing things that make us feel faint now. There’s a lot of good advice in Nora’s chapter on entertainment and cooking. But a significant amount of that advice is designed to keep your dinner party guests at the table for a good long period of time. Don’t serve fish, she says, because it’s too easy to eat fish. “You’re done, you’re out the door.” And she says she gave up on Nigella Lawson when her cupcake recipe failed in a big way. Wow! Me too, those cupcakes are awful. But there’s nothing like Nigella’s spinach, mint and lettuce salad, not to mention her Guiness cake.

So my re-take on Nora’s cookbook chapter: do serve fish. I don’t know about you, but I get really tired after 10:00, and I’d just as soon people gathered up their clever conversation and drifted out the door. Obviously, I need to start looking for fish recipes so I can move my guests out the door. And she’s wrong about Nigella. Go check out the Nigella’s Guiness Cake Recipe, I put it up on my BB under Recipes.

Maintenance
OK, one last re-take on Nora’s book. There is definitely good advice here. I love the idea of threading stray hairs, though I don’t live near anyone who could do threading. And though I’ve never had any impulse to inject things into my lips, I appreciate her warning that she looked like an Ubangi afterwards. She has a little bottle of La Mer sitting around that someone gave her, because it’s too expensive to use. Weird, so do I! A friend gave it to me, and it smells like fish (I guess that would be because mer=sea), and so it just sits there, looking expensive.

But the part of this chapter that really caught me was her huge enthusiasm for getting one’s hair “done” in a salon: getting it waved and blown dry. For me, this felt like my childhood in Minnesota, when ladies used to go get “done,” an obscure word that encompassed sitting under a huge hairdryer and looking as if she was about to blow into outer space.

So I tried it. The last two booksignings I went to, I had my hair “done.” Since I don’t have the tolerance to blow dry my hair, even for a moment, and yet my hairdresser expects great things of me in this line, I looked a lot better after getting my hair “done.” Check out the picture on the Meet Eloisa page if you don’t believe me.

But here’s the part she didn’t mention: that’s another human interaction in the service sector that you have to negotiate, from describing what you want done, to having cold water dripped down your neck, to making strained small talk with someone named Bliss, to figuring out a tip.

It’s not worth it!

So that’s my re-visitation of Nora’s book. If you read this book and have a few corrections like mine (which are spoken within the bounds of utter admiration), please come on the BB and add your own!

-Eloisa