I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"But the honest truth is that it's sad to be over sixty. The long shadows are everywhere -- friends dying and battling illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones. There are dreams that are never quite going to come true, ambitions that will never quite be realized. There are, in short, regrets. Edith Piaf was famous for singing a song called 'Non, Je ne regrette rien.' It's a good song. I know what she meant.""

What a strange reading experience! Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006) comes highly recommended. It even made (albeit just barely) The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century! (I hope the century is not over yet.) My opinions often agree with those of The Guardian, so it was precisely their recommendation that made me reach for the book. (For whatever it is worth, I Feel Bad was also the "#1 National Bestseller.") The book is a collection of 15 short pieces/essays on various topics - mainly the so-called everyday life - strongly connected by their autobiographical nature.

Anyway, I began reading and as I kept going I started wondering whether my senility has progressed further than I realize. I could not see any greatness in the essays. The teasers for the book scream "hilarious," "laugh-out-loud," "wry observations," "memorable essays," "blithe charm," etc. I do not agree. I was finding the pieces largely predictable, superficial, and not that funny. Take the piece titled Parenting in Three Stages. The "surprising" aspects of parenting will only surprise the readers who have never been parents. A lot of the attempted humor is on a TV sitcom level (canned laughter missing).

I did not toss the book because I have a curious mental disability that prevents me from not finishing a book that I started reading. Also, some faint humor began to appear about page 100:

"My father takes one look at me as I get off the plane and says to my mother 'Well, maybe someone will marry her for her personality.'"

As did some deeper observations like the following quote from E. L. Doctorow:

"I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative."

And then comes page 112 (out of the total volume of 138 pages). The formless, ugly pupa of a book metamorphoses into a beautiful butterfly. The essay The Lost Strudel or Le Strudel Perdu is an insightful, almost cliché-free, and beautifully written reflection on the passage of time. The piece On Rapture is about the love of books, and could serve as mandatory reading for members of Goodreads. Next comes a little stumble: cliché-full What I Wish I'd Known (for example,

"When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.")

The last essay, Considering the Alternative, stunning and memorable, is the high point of the book. This piece alone makes the entire collection worthwhile. I will not expound on this essay because I agree with Ms. Ephron when she says "Let's not be morbid!" Let's not!

It's hard to assign a summary rating for such an uneven work. Well, two stars for the first 100 pages, four-to-five stars for the last 40 pages.

Three stars.

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