I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

This collection of essays is boring and pointless.  Ephron pontificates about various topics, including aging, food, and marriage.  However, the book lacks depth.  It is purely fluff, and bad at that.  I kept hoping for an insight, a nugget into life, something to alter the course of my existence even if as simple as my discovery of chocolate and peanut butter once was, but nothing.

I could not relate to this book because I am not a woman, I am not past fifty, and I am not a New Yorker.  The longest essay is about living in Apthorp in New York City.  I think to understand the mentality of Ephron, you have to be a New Yorker.  Or at least from the Northeast.  I do not think that Ephron plays in the South or that she understands or speaks to the South.  (Imagine Woody Allen remaking To Kill a Mockingbird in rural Alabama.)

I was anticipating more from the ex-wife of Carl Bernstein and the screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You've Got Mail.  But none of those are favorite movies of mine, so I shouldn't be surprised this book is a disappointment too.

The best passage in the book is about needing reading glasses, since her eyesight has worsened with age.  She is sad at this because of her love of reading, which we share and she eloquently describes:

Mostly I'm sad about just plain reading.  When I pass a bookshelf, I like to pick out a book from it and thumb through it.  When I see a newspaper on the couch, I like to sit down with it.  When the mail arrives, I like to rip it open.  Reading is one of the main things I do.  Reading is everything.  Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person.  Reading makes me smarter.  Reading gives me something to talk about later on.  Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself... But my ability to pick something up and read it - which has gone unchecked all my life up until now - is now entirely dependent on the whereabouts of my reading glasses.  I look around  Why aren't they in this room?  I bought six pair of them last week on sale and sprinkled them throughout the house, yet none of them is visible.  Where are they?