There is a lot about getting older that is disappointing, according to the late, great Nora Ephron, though top of her list is what happens to a woman’s neck. “Short of surgery, there’s not a damn thing you can do about a neck. 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 if it had a neck.”
This sharply funny essay collection was a hit for the When Harry Met Sally writer who famously maintained “everything is copy”. Along with bemoaning the state of her neck, she reflects on her culinary misadventures, an underwhelming encounter with JFK, and the state of women’s handbags with their “morass of loose Tic Tacs, solitary Advils, lipsticks without tops, ChapSticks of unknown vintage, little bits of tobacco even though there has been no smoking going on for at least 10 years”. There are titbits of wisdom, too, among them: “Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of 35, you will be nostalgic for at the age of 45.”
