I Feel Bad About my Neck And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron

 I Feel Bad About my Neck And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron

is a sunny and funny books on ageing and more. 

I returned yesterday at the emporium of Umbertide Books for Dogs; as always I found beautiful readings, but the one captured me the most was this one; I love and love and love and immensely love all the writings by Nora. 

Once returned home, I read it in few hours, involving my mother; we both smiled and laughed thinking at the fact that Nora is completely right regarding age, and necks, and faces plenty of botox telling lies and necks telling truths and that ageing is not beauty at all, and that maybe it would be better to be still young than not wise.

A New Yorker's addicted, Nora loved and loved immensely cooking every sorta of food. She took it seriously. Her mother presented her a sort of Bible on cooking, and with the time she fell in love for many other authors, one of them brought in the big screen; have you seen Julie&Julia? Right!

Married several times, the second marriage ended pretty badly; the husband went to bed with someone else while she was still pregnant; but Nora was a woman of big resources and temperament. She defines herself someone absolutely undiscreet and maybe that's why to her point of view, someone like John Kennedy, a man addicted for women didn't go to bed with her (the only stagist he didn't "pass"); she would have told this to everyone! 

A chapter I loved was the one of purses; one day Angela a british lady said me that the purse I had was too big for her. "My husband said me once: don't keep a purse where, for searching an object, you spend wagons of time like an old lady." I start to believe that it is true. Nora didn't love purses. When she was a freelancer, she didn't need a purse, because the place she loved to visit the most was heh kitchen; she just brought with her 20 dollars, a credit card just in case, if in the evening she decided to immerse herself in the NYC's atmosphere.

Sure, later she bought a purse, in particular when she wasn't anymore a freelancer; and here start a trip in the world of purses that Nora would have avoided with all herself; whatever she picked up wasn't OK for her; too big, too small, too expensive; the good occasion for losing things is a purse; you'll laugh when you'll read that part of the tale! 

After the experience with a friend in Paris who bought a second hand Hermes purse, once returned home she bought a 26 dollar bag! A MetroCard bag.

An hilarious chapter the one of maintanance,  from hair to unwanted hair passing through skin and every possible lotions bought for killing the time and having a good skin.

You'll laugh when she will write on clothes, skirts, shirts that unfortunately women can't wear anymore, because here and there start to develop imperfections. 

Why 60 years worried Nora? Well, ageing apart, because it's in this part of the existence that we start to lose friends and dear ones and we feel what it means mortality. 

Nora was a beautiful, intellectually honest person, of great rarety and simply she wrote what she thought. Enchanting. As always.

This reading has been for sure a joyous one!

Always recommended.

Anna Maria Polidori