nora ephron purse essay

This Nora Ephron Essay Is A Hilarious Reminder That It's OK To Not Have Your Life Totally Together

Everyone knows her: That woman who just seems to always be so perfectly put together. And she's not just killing it at work or in her relationships — she looks put together, too. Maybe her makeup is always impeccable. Or maybe her hair is never not on point. And maybe she has a seemingly neverending series of gorgeous handbags that are always perfectly organized. If you're anything like writer Nora Ephron , it's that last one that has you wallowing in some serious feelings of inadequacy. In her 2002 essay, "I Hate My Purse," Ephron talks about just that: how much she hates purses and all of the baggage, both literal and metaphorical, they can add to our shoulders. She writes:

"I hate my purse. I absolutely hate it. If you're one of those women who think there's something great about purses, don't even bother reading this because there is nothing here for you. This is for the women who hate their purses, who are bad at purses, who understand that their purses are reflections of their negligent housekeeping, hopeless disorganization, a chronic inability to throw anything away, and an ongoing failure to handle the obligations of a demanding and difficult accessory (the obligation, for example, that it should in someway match what you're wearing.)"

And that's just it, isn't it? Our purses mean so much more than just fashion. Ephron goes on to detail all of the different ways she tried to get around the purse problem. As a freelance writer she tried to go the super minimalist route. Often at home working, she was able to get away with packing just a lipstick, credit card and $20 bill in her pocket during nights out. Then she went the complete opposite way, buying a bag so big that she could fit too much in it — old airplane snacks in case she ever got hungry, a cosmetics back she forgot to zip and sunscreen she forgot to close, an electronic date book with no batteries and, of course, a pair of sneakers. She writes:

"Before you know it, your purse weights 20 pounds and you're in danger of getting bursitis and needing an operation just from carrying it around. Everything you own is in your purse. You could flee the Cossacks with your purse. But when you open it up, you can't find a thing in it — your purse is just a big dark hole that you spend hours fishing around for. A flashlight would help, but if you were to put it into your purse, you'd never find it."

The Most Of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron, $20, Amazon

Again, we all know that this isn't just about purses. This is about the difference between having it all together, like the girl with the perfectly organized designer tote, or falling apart at the seams as you stuff the entire contents of your studio apartment into some sort of pleather monstrosity. But, here's the thing: no one has it all together, even if their handbags make you think they do. Ephron learned this in stunning clarity on a trip to Paris with a friend, the sort of put-together woman who did think there was something great about purses. Her mission was to purchase a highly covetable (and highly expensive) vintage Hermès Kelly bag at a flea market. Let's just say, things didn't go quite according to plan. She writes:

"Anyway, my friend bought her Kelly bag. She paid twenty-six hundred dollars for it. The color wasn't exactly what she wanted, but it was in wonderful shape. Of course, it would have to be waterproofed immediately because it would lose half its value if it got caught in the rain...The two of us went to a bistro, and the Kelly bag was placed in the middle of the table, where it sat like a small shrine to a shopping victory. And then, outside, it began to rain."

It was right then and there that Ephron decided to give up on purses and, in essence, give up on the idea of "having it all together" by anyone's standards but her own. She went back to New York and bought herself a tote bag with an image of MetroCard emblazoned on its front. "It cost next to nothing," she writes, "and I will never have to replace it because it is completely indestructible. What's more, never having been in style, it can never go out of style." By ignoring all of the societal standards of what makes a great purse — i.e. what makes a great woman — Ephron found her own version of it. And really, what more can we do than that?

"And wherever I go," Ephron writes, "people say to me 'I love that bag.' 'Where did you get that bag?'...For all I know they've all gone off and bought one. Or else they haven't. It doesn't matter. I'm very happy."

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I Feel Bad About My Neck, And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Nora ephron.

139 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

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"Oh the necks. There are chicken necks. There are turkey gobbler necks. There are elephant necks. There are necks with wattles and necks with creases that are on the verge of becoming wattles. There are scrawny necks and fat necks, loose necks, crepey necks, banded necks, wrinkled necks, stringy necks, saggy necks, flabby necks, mottled necks."

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Excerpt: 'I Feel Bad About My Neck'

Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron, hiding from the inevitable. Elena Seibert Photography hide caption

Nora Ephron, hiding from the inevitable.

What I Wish I'd Known

People have only one way to be.

Buy, don't rent.

Never marry a man you wouldn't want to be divorced from.

Don't cover a couch with anything that isn't more or less beige.

Don't buy anything that is 100 percent wool even if it seems to be very soft and not particularly itchy when you try it on in the store.

You can't be friends with people who call after 11 p.m.

Block everyone on your instant mail.

The world's greatest babysitter burns out after two and a half years.

You never know.

The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money.

The plane is not going to crash.

Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five.

At the age of fifty-five you will get a saggy roll just above your waist even if you are painfully thin.

This saggy roll just above your waist will be especially visible from the back and will force you to reevaluate half the clothes in your closet, especially the white shirts.

Write everything down.

Keep a journal.

Take more pictures.

The empty nest is underrated.

You can order more than one dessert.

You can't own too many black turtleneck sweaters.

If the shoe doesn't fit in the shoe store, it's never going to fit.

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

Back up your files.

Overinsure everything.

Whenever someone says the words "Our friendship is more important than this," watch out, because it almost never is.

There's no point in making piecrust from scratch.

The reason you're waking up in the middle of the night is the second glass of wine.

The minute you decide to get divorced, go see a lawyer and file the papers.

Never let them know.

If only one third of your clothes are mistakes, you're ahead of the game.

If friends ask you to be their child's guardian in case they die in a plane crash, you can say no.

There are no secrets.

Excerpted from I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron Copyright © 2006 by Nora Ephron. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other...

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Nora Ephron is back with this slim, delightful volume of short essays about what it's like to be a modern woman, particularly a woman "of a certain age." No odes to Jimmy Choos and Birkin bags here. No long boozy discourses on unattainable men while drinking cosmopolitans. On the contrary, Ephron spends a great deal of time discussing the very real frustrations of being a modern woman. She's not one to suffer gladly from "purse envy": In the aptly titled "I Hate My Purse" she warns: "If you're one of those women who think there's something great about purses, don't even bother reading this because there will be nothing here for you." She details a recent trip to Paris with a friend whose mission it was to obtain a vintage Kelly Bag, which she did, only to sit for hours at a café because she didn't want to get her new bag wet in the rain. All that money and fuss for something that loose Tic Tacs will litter the bottom of, the author muses.

One of the more enjoyable essays serves as a sort of culinary memoir. In "Serial Monogamy: A Memoir," Ephron recalls her introduction to cuisine and cooking, with the gift of THE GOURMET COOKBOOK from her mother in 1962. Intrigued by trying out new recipes and admiring those who write them, she gleans what she can from everyone from Julia Child to Martha Stewart. In addition to savory memories of meals past, she imparts helpful information such as "the Rule of Four," something she picked up from a chef specializing in southern cuisine, the idea being that "most people serve three things for dinner --- some sort of meat, some sort of starch, and some sort of vegetable --- but Lee always served four. And the fourth thing was always unexpected...whatever it was, that fourth thing seemed to have an almost magical effect on the eating process." If "Serial Monogamy" doesn't send you running for your cookbooks, then nothing will.

The title essay, as well as "On Maintenance," directly addresses the issue of aging in this youth-obsessed culture. Ephron wishes she could do something about her sagging neck instead of always wearing scarves and turtlenecks to compensate. But she knows that to do something about her neck would require a full face-lift and she's not quite ready for that level of surgical commitment. What about exercise? This is a woman who views her DVD of the musical Chicago as a workout tape, so logging time on the treadmill is her idea of hell. If there are any young readers of this collection, Ephron suggests they appreciate their youthful beauty while they have it, which means to put on a bikini and don't take it off until you're 34.

The ode to New York living, "Moving On," which was published in The New Yorker prior to this collection, might find resonance with only metropolitan readers, but most of these essays remind us of just why we love Nora Ephron in the first place. Always witty, urbane but not alienating, inviting and funny, she charms her readers with her agonies and ecstasies of being a woman. Reading I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK is the literary equivalent of having lunch with a close girlfriend.

Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller on January 22, 2011

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

Publication Date: August 1, 2006
Genres: Essays , Humor
Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN-10: 0307264556
ISBN-13: 9780307264558

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I Feel Bad About My Neck (Ephron)

Book Club Discussion Questions 1. In “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” Ephron writes that she avoids making truthful comments on how her friends look, even when they ask her directly [pp. 3–4]. Why is this a wise decision? She says, “the neck is a dead giveaway” [p. 5]. When women seek each other's opinions about how their necks, and other features, really look, do they want the truth, or do they want to be reassured? 2. According to Ephron, most authors who write about aging say “it great to be old. It's great to be wise and sage and mellow” [p. 7]. What, for her, is wrong with this approach? How would you compare I Feel Bad About My Neck with other books you have read about aging or menopause? Is it more useful? 3. In “I Hate My Purse,” Ephron sees her purse as a microcosm of her life—it is the symbol of her inability to be organized. Given the current obsession with expensive purses in American fashion, why is her choice of a plastic MetroCard bag amusing [pp. 15–16]? 4. What do the foods we cook, the cookbook authors we seek to emulate, and the way we entertain guests, say about how we want life to be? Why does Ephron give up her attachment to Craig Claiborne and begin “to make a study of Lee Bailey” [p. 26], and then later move on to Martha Stewart and Nigella Lawson?

5. Heartburn was a “thinly disguised novel about the end of my marriage” [p. 28]. If you have read Heartburn or seen the film, think about how Ephron presents her current stage in life, and what has changed for her. What is her attitude as she reflects on earlier and more difficult periods of her life? 6. Ephron writes, “I sometimes think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death” [p. 32]. She also says that going to a hair salon twice a week and having her hair blown dry is “cheaper by far than psychoanalysis, and much more uplifting” [p. 34]. For Ephron, “maintenance” has larger implications than just taking care of one's appearance. What are the larger meanings of these annoying, repetitive actions, for her—and by implication, for women in general? 7. What would this book be like if written by a man? Do men have similar issues about growing older, and do they talk or think about them in similar ways? Think about and share ideas about what well-known man—a writer or a celebrity, perhaps—might be capable of writing the male version of I Feel Bad About My Neck . 8. In “Parenting in Three Stages,” Ephron revises some commonly held notions. Adolescence, for instance, is a period that helps parents separate from their children, and there is “almost nothing you can do to make life easier for yourself except wait until it's over” [p. 62]. Later in the book she says, “the empty nest is underrated” [p. 125]. How does being in her sixties, with her children out of the house, change Ephron's perspective on motherhood? 9. In “Moving On,” Ephron writes about an important and prolonged episode in her past: a love affair with an apartment building. How does she eventually “move on”? Does this essay suggest that she has become more pragmatic with time? How does she change her mind about what makes sense for her, as she gets older? 10. Why is “The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less” such an effective way of telling one's life story? What does Ephron focus on as the most important issues in this miniaturized autobiography? What lessons has she learned? 11. While this is undoubtedly a funny and enjoyable book, in what ways is it also a serious book? What are Ephron's most important insights in “Considering the Alternative”? 12. What, if anything, does I Feel Bad About My Neck have to say about the benefits of growing older? 13. Certain small pieces in this collection might provoke you and members of your group to try writing your own version. What would you include, for instance, in your own list of “What I Wish I'd Known”? 14. What is the funniest moment in this collection, and why? ( Questions issued by publisher .) top of page (Summary)

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Moving On, a Love Story

By Nora Ephron

An illustration of the entrance to an apartment building

In February, 1980, two months after the birth of my second child and the simultaneous end of my marriage, I fell madly in love. I was looking for a place to live, and one afternoon I walked just ten steps into an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and my heart stood still. This was it. At first sight. Eureka. Ten steps in and I said, “I’ll take it.”

The apartment was huge. It was on the fifth floor of the Apthorp, a famous stone pile at the corner of Broadway and Seventy-ninth Street. The rent was fifteen hundred dollars a month, which, by Manhattan standards, was practically a bargain. Trust me, it was. In addition, I had to pay the previous tenant twenty-four thousand dollars in key money (as it’s known in New York City) for the right to move in. I didn’t have twenty-four thousand dollars. I went to a bank and borrowed the money. No one in the building could believe that I would pay so much in key money for a rental apartment; it was an astronomical amount. But the apartment had beautiful rooms (most of them painted taxicab yellow, but that could easily be fixed); high ceilings; lots of light; two gorgeous (although nonworking) fireplaces; and five, count them, five bedrooms. It seemed to me that if I lived in the building for twenty-four years the fee would amortize out to only a thousand dollars a year, a very small surcharge. I mean, we’re talking about only $2.74 a day, which is less than a cappuccino at Starbucks. Not that there was a Starbucks then. And not that I was planning to live in the Apthorp for twenty-four years. I was planning to live there forever. Till death did us part. So it would probably amortize out to even less. That’s how I figured it. (I should point out that I don’t normally use the word “amortize” unless I’m trying to prove that something I can’t really afford is not just a bargain but practically free. This usually involves dividing the cost of the item I can’t afford by the number of years I’m planning to use it, or, if that doesn’t work, by the number of days or hours or minutes, until I get to a number that is less than the cost of a cappuccino.)

But forget the money. This, after all, is not a story about money. It’s a story about love. And all stories about love begin with a certain amount of rationalization.

I had never planned to live on the Upper West Side, but after a few weeks I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, and I began, in my manner, to make a religion out of my neighborhood. This was probably a consequence of my not having any other religion in my life, but never mind. I was a block from H & H Bagels and Zabar’s. I was half a block from a subway station. There was an all-night newsstand across the street. On the corner was La Caridad, the greatest Cuban-Chinese restaurant in the world, or so I told my friends, and I made a religion of it, too.

But my true religious zeal focussed on the Apthorp itself. I honestly believed that at the lowest moment in my adult life I’d been rescued by a building. All right, I’m being melodramatic, but that’s what I believed. I’d left New York City a year earlier to move to Washington, D.C., for what I sincerely thought would be the rest of my life. I’d tried to be cheerful about it. But the horrible reality kept crashing in on me. I would stare out the window of my Washington apartment, which had a commanding view of the lions at the National Zoo. The lions at the National Zoo! Oh, the metaphors of captivity that leaped to mind! The lions lived in a large, comfortable space, like me, and had plenty of food, like me. But were they happy? Et cetera. At other times, the old Clairol ad—“If I’ve only one life to live, let me live it as a blonde”—reverberated through my brain, although my version of it had nothing to do with hair color. If I have only one life to live, I thought, self-pityingly, why am I living it here? But then, of course, I would remember why: I was married, and my husband lived in Washington, and I was in love with him, and we had one baby and another on the way.

When my marriage came to an end, I realized that I would no longer have to worry about whether the marginal neighborhood where we lived was ever going to have a cheese store. I would be free to move back to New York City—which was not just the Big Apple but Cheese Central. But I had no hope that I’d find a place to rent that I could afford that had room enough for us all.

When you give up your apartment in New York and move to another city, New York becomes the worst version of itself. Someone I know once wisely said that the expression “It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there” is completely wrong where New York is concerned; the opposite is true. New York is a very livable city. But when you move away and become a visitor the city seems to turn against you. It’s much more expensive (because you have to eat all your meals out and pay for a place to sleep) and much more unfriendly. Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don’t mind this when you live here; it’s part of the caffeinated romance of the city that never sleeps. But when you leave you experience change as a betrayal. You walk up Third Avenue planning to buy a brownie at a bakery you’ve always been loyal to, and the bakery’s gone. Your dry cleaner moves to Florida; your dentist retires; the lady who made the pies on West Fourth Street vanishes; the maître d’ at P. J. Clarke’s quits, and you realize you’re going to have to start from scratch tipping your way into the heart of the cold, chic young woman now at the door. You’ve turned your back for only a moment, and suddenly everything’s different. You were an insider, a native, a subway traveller, a purveyor of tips into the good stuff, and now you’re just another frequent flyer, stuck in a taxi on the Grand Central Parkway as you wing in and out of LaGuardia. Meanwhile, you read that Manhattan rents are going up, they’re climbing higher, they’ve reached the stratosphere. It seems that the moment you left town they put up a wall around the place, and you will never manage to vault over it and get back into the city again. The apartment in the Apthorp seemed like an urban miracle. I’d found a haven. And the architecture of the building added to the illusion.

The Apthorp, which was built in 1908 by the Astor family, is twelve stories high and the size of a full city block. From the street, it’s lumpen, Middle European, and solid as a tanker, but its core is a large courtyard with two marble fountains and a lovely garden. Enter the courtyard, and the city falls away; you find yourself in the embrace of a beautiful sheltered park. There are stone benches where you can sit in the afternoon as your children run merrily around, ride their bicycles, fight with one another, and threaten to fall into the fountain and drown. In the spring, there are tulips and azaleas, in summer pale-blue hostas and hydrangeas.

Most people who don’t live in New York have no idea that New Yorkers have exactly the same sense of neighborhood that supposedly exists in small-town America; in the Apthorp, this sense is magnified, because the courtyard provides countless opportunities for residents to bump into one another and eventually learn one another’s names. At Halloween, those of us with small children turned the courtyard street lamps into a fantasy of pumpkin-headed ghosts; in December the landlords erected an electric menorah, which coexisted with a Christmas tree covered with twinkle lights.

As it happened, I had several acquaintances who lived in the building, and a few of them became close friends—at least in part because we were neighbors. The man I was seeing, whom I eventually married, managed to tip his way to a lease on a top-floor apartment. My sister Delia and her husband moved into the building; she, too, planned to live there until the day she died. When Delia and I worked together writing movies, it was a simple matter of her coming down from her apartment, crossing the courtyard, and coming up to mine; on rainy days, she could even take an underground route. My friend Rosie O’Donnell took an apartment on the top floor and became so captivated by a doorman named George, who had a big personality, that she booked him onto her talk show. Like most Apthorp doormen, George did not actually open the door—which was, incidentally, a huge, heavy iron gate that you often desperately needed help with—but he did provide a running commentary on everyone who lived in the building, and whenever I came home he filled me in on the whereabouts of my husband, my boys, my babysitter, my sister, my brother-in-law, and even Rosie, who painted her apartment orange, installed walls of shelves for her extensive collection of Happy Meal toys, feuded with her neighbors about her dogs, and fought with the landlords about the fact that her washing machine was somehow irrevocably hooked up to the bathtub drain. Then she moved out. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that anyone would leave the Apthorp voluntarily. I was never going to leave. They will take me out feet first, I said.

Every so often, an ambulance pulled into the courtyard and did take a tenant out feet first, and within minutes the landlords would be deluged with inquiries about a possible vacancy, most of them from tenants who had seen the ambulance come in or out (or had heard about it from George) and wanted to upgrade to a larger space.

At the time I moved in, the Apthorp was owned by a consortium of elderly persons—although, come to think of it, they were not much older than I am now. One of them was a charming, courtly gentleman, active in all sorts of charities involving Holocaust survivors. He lived long enough to be taken to court for a number of things, none of them the crime that I happen to believe he was guilty of, which was lining his pockets with cash payoffs made by people who were either moving in or moving out of the building. I was very fond of him and his sporty red Porsche, which he drove right up to the day he was taken to the hospital. There he took his last kickback, from neighbors of mine, and died. The kickback was part of the two hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars in key money my neighbors had charged a new tenant for the right to take over their lease. That’s right. Someone paid two hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars in key money to move into the Apthorp. How was this possible? What was the thinking? Actually, I could guess: the thinking was that over fifty-six years the two hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars would amortize out to four cappuccinos a day. Grande cappuccinos. Mucho grande cappuccinos.

I lived in the Apthorp in a state of giddy delirium for about ten years. The water in the bathtub often ran brown, there was probably asbestos in the radiators, and the exterior of the building was encrusted with soot. Also, there were mice. Who cared? My rent slowly inched up—the Rent Guidelines Board allowed increases of around eight per cent every two years—but the apartment was still a bargain. By this time, the real-estate boom had begun in New York, and the newspapers were full of shocking articles about escalating rents; there were one-room apartments in Manhattan renting for two thousand dollars a month. I was paying the same amount for eight rooms. I felt like a genius.

Meanwhile, there were unhappy tenants in the building, suing the landlords over various grievances; I couldn’t imagine why. What did they want? Service? A paint job every so often? The willing replacement of a broken appliance? There were even residents who complained about the fact that the building didn’t allow your Chinese food to be brought up to your apartment. So what? Every time I walked into the courtyard at the end of the day, I fell in love all over again.

My feelings were summed up perfectly by a policeman who turned up one night to handle an altercation on my floor. My next-door neighbor was a kind and pleasant professor, the sort of man who would not hurt a flea; his son often left his bicycle in the vestibule outside our apartment. A neighbor down the hall, an accountant, became angry about the professor’s son’s bicycle, which he apparently thought was an eyesore, and it probably was. One afternoon, he decided to put it directly in front of the professor’s door, blocking it. The professor found the bike there and returned it to its spot in the hallway. The accountant put it back in front of the door, once again blocking it. There was quite a lot of noisy crashing about while all this was going on, and it got my attention; as a result, I was lurking at my front door, peeking out into the vestibule, when the final chapter of the drama occurred.

The professor had just put the bicycle back out in the hall, and he, too, was waiting inside his front door hoping to catch the accountant in the act of once again moving it. Both of us stood there idiotically looking through the sheer curtains on our glass-panelled front doors. Sure enough, the accountant came down the hall and moved the bicycle so that it blocked the professor’s door. At that moment, the professor flung his door open and began shouting at the accountant, whom, incidentally, he towered over. Within seconds, he lost it completely and slugged the accountant. It was incredibly exciting. The accountant called the police. The police arrived in short order. Since I, owing to my nosiness, had been a witness to the incident, I invited myself to the meeting with the police and my neighbors. The meeting took place in the professor’s rent-stabilized apartment, which had even more bedrooms than mine. Each man told his version of events, and then I told mine. I have to say that mine was the best version, since it included a short, extremely insightful, and probably completely irrelevant digression about the impatience that childless people have for people with children (and bicycles). You had to be there. Anyway, when we were all finished one of the policemen shook his head and stood up. “Why can’t you people get along?” he said as he headed for the door. “I would kill to live in this building.”

Eventually, I began to have a recurring dream about the Apthorp—or, to be accurate, a recurring nightmare. I dreamed I had accidentally moved out of the building, realized it was the worst mistake of my life, and couldn’t get my lease back. I have had enough psychoanalysis to know not to take such dreams literally, but it’s nonetheless amazing to me that, when my unconscious mind searched for a symbol of what I would most hate to lose, it came up with my apartment.

Around 1990, rumors began to spread that there was about to be a change in the rent laws: under certain circumstances, rent stabilization could be abolished, and landlords would be able to raise rents to something known as fair-market value. I refused to pay any attention. My neighbors were obsessed with what might happen; they suggested that our rents might be raised to eight or ten thousand dollars a month. I thought that they were being unbelievably neurotic. Rent stabilization was an indelible part of New York life, like Gray’s Papaya. It would never be tampered with. I was willing to concede (well, not too willing) that under certain circumstances there might be some justice in the new law; I could understand that you could make a case (a weak case) that people like me had been getting away with a form of subsidized housing for years; I could see (dimly) that the landlords were entitled to something. But I was sure that if our rents were raised the hike would be a reasonable one. After all, the tenants in the building were a family. The landlords understood that. They would never do anything so unreasonable as to double or triple our rents. This moment of innocence on my part was comparable to the moment—early in all love stories that end badly—when a wife discovers the faintest whiff of another woman’s perfume on her husband’s shirt, decides it’s nothing, and goes blithely about her business. I went blithely about my business. And then the building hired a manager named Barbara Ross.

Miss Ross was a small, frightening woman with pale-white skin, bright-red lips, and a huge, jet-black beehive of hair on top of her head. The beehive was so outsized and bizarre that it reminded me of the nineteen-fifties urban legend about the woman who teased her hair so much that cockroaches moved in. Her voice dripped honey, which made her even more terrifying. She was either forty years old or seventy, no one knew. She wore pink silk shantung suits with gigantic shoulder pads. She lurked everywhere. She lived in New Jersey, but she spent Thursday nights in the building office, and rumor had it that she sneaked around in her bare feet, trying to catch the elevator operators napping. She issued memos discouraging children from playing ball in the courtyard. She repaved the courtyard and covered the cobblestones with tar. She had a way of coming upon you in the hallway and making you feel guilty even if you were entirely innocent. She was, in short, a character from a nightmare, so much so that she instantly became a running character in mine: I began to dream that I had accidentally moved out of the Apthorp, realized it was the worst mistake of my life, and couldn’t get my lease back because of Miss Ross.

Meanwhile, the unthinkable happened. The state legislature passed a luxury-decontrol law stating that any tenant whose rent was more than two thousand dollars a month and who earned more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year would automatically be removed from rent stabilization. I was stunned. I could understand the new law applying to new tenants, but how on earth could it apply to those of us who had lived in the building for years under the implicit bargain involved in rent stabilization? I had never gotten a paint job from the building, I’d never even asked for one, and now the landlords were about to treat me as if I were living in a luxury apartment. It was totally unfair! It was completely unjust! It was wrong! It was practically unconstitutional! It was also, of course, not remotely compelling to anyone in the outside world. I made a very decent living. I was going to have my rent raised. What’s more, as far as I knew, I was going to be the first person in the building to undergo the experience. And no one cared. Even I wouldn’t have cared if I hadn’t been me. On the other hand, I wasn’t exactly me. I was in love. I was a true believer, just like one of those French villagers in the Middle Ages who come to believe they’ve seen the tears of St. Cecilia on a scrap of oilcloth; I was a character in a story about mass delusion and the madness of crowds. I was, in short, completely nuts.

And so I went to see Miss Ross. As I recall, I gave a tender speech about my love for the building. It was fantastically moving, if not to her. She informed me that my rent was going to be tripled. We negotiated. She dropped the price. She dropped it just enough for me to believe that I had managed a small victory. How much did she drop it to? I can’t possibly tell you. I’m too embarrassed to type the number. Even if I assured you that in the context of New York rents it wasn’t that outrageous, you’d never believe me. The point is, I agreed to pay it. I signed a new lease.

I signed because I had enough money to pay the rent but not nearly enough to buy an apartment nearly as nice anywhere in the city.

I signed because my accountant was able, in that way accountants have, to persuade me that the money I would pay in rent was less than I would pay in monthly maintenance plus mortgage interest on a co-op apartment.

I signed because I was, as you already know, an expert in rationalization, and I convinced myself that there were huge savings involved in my staying in the building. The cost of moving, for instance. The cost of new telephone service. The cost of the postage required to notify my friends that I would be living at a new address. The cost of furniture, in case I needed new furniture for the apartment I hadn’t found and wasn’t moving into. The hours and days and possibly even weeks of my time that would be wasted trying to reach the cable company—during which time I might instead write a great novel and earn a small fortune that would more than pay for the rent increase.

But, as I said, this isn’t a story about money. This is a story about love. I signed the lease because I wasn’t ready to get a divorce from my building.

Many years ago, when I was in analysis, my therapist used to say, “Love is homesickness.” What she meant was that you tend to fall in love with someone who reminds you of one of your parents. This, of course, is one of those things that analysts always say, even though it isn’t really true. Just about anyone on the planet is capable of reminding you of something about one of your parents, even if it’s only a dimple. But I don’t mean to digress. The point I want to make is that love may or may not be homesickness, but homesickness is definitely love.

My apartment in the Apthorp was really the only space that my children and I had ever lived in together. Since the day we moved in, we had never locked the door. It was the place where Max got his head stuck in a cake pan and Jacob learned to tie his shoelaces. My husband, Nick, and I were married there, in front of the nonworking living-room fireplace. It was a symbol of family. It was an emblem of the moment in my life when my luck changed. It was part of my identity—or, at least, part of my wishful thinking about my identity. Because it was on the unfashionable West Side, just living there made me feel virtuous and brainy. Because it was a rental, it made me feel unpretentious. Because it was shabby, it made me feel chic. In short, it was home in a profound, probably narcissistic, and, I suspect, all too typical way, and it seemed to me that no place on earth would ever feel the same.

The whammies began to mount up. A mysterious dead body was found on the roof of the building. One of the apartments caught ﬁre. An apartment on the eleventh ﬂoor was robbed, and the housekeeper was assaulted.

And then truly shocking things began to happen. The landlords cleaned the building! The landlords, who had basically done nothing to the building since we moved in, sandblasted the soot from the exterior, replaced pipes, redid the elevators, and painted the elevator and lobby ceilings gold. They dressed the building employees in braid-trimmed uniforms with epaulets; the staff began to look like a Hispanic version of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The senior landlord, a man named Nason Gordon, removed the mailbox from the building entrance and replaced it with a large marble statue of a naked woman, which the tenants instantly christened Our Lady of the Apthorp. He planted horrible white stucco urns outside the entrance, and dotted the courtyard with ludicrous statues of lions. The tenants experienced all these changes—every last one—as acts of hostility. Clearly, the improvements were being made for one reason and one reason alone—to raise our rents. Which was true; every time the landlords spent money on the building, they trotted off to the Rent Guidelines Board and asked for rent increases based on their expenditures. As a result, more and more tenants lurched toward luxury decontrol and a state of absolute panic. The fear was exacerbated by the fact that the new law made it possible for landlords to be utterly capricious about the increases. After all, what was fair-market value for an eight-room apartment in a city where there were almost no eight-room apartments for rent?

The nineteen-nineties were cresting, and there was a huge amount of money out there in the streets of New York. Empty apartments in the Apthorp were renovated, Miss Ross picked out garish chandeliers for them, and rich tenants moved in. One of the new tenants was actually paying twenty-four thousand dollars a month in rent. Twenty-four thousand dollars a month—and you still couldn’t get the doorman to open the gate or have the Chinese food delivered to you. Rich men getting divorces moved in. Movie stars came and went.

The courtyard, once an idyllic spot full of happy, laughing children, was suddenly crowded with idling limousines waiting for the new tenants to be spirited away to their fabulous midtown careers. Angry tenants waved petitions and legal papers and spread rumors of further impending rent rises.

My lease expired again, and Miss Ross called to tell me that my rent was being raised. The landlords were willing to give me a three-year lease—ten thousand dollars a month the first year, eleven thousand the second, twelve thousand the third. My rent had effectively been raised four hundred per cent in three years.

And, just like that, I fell out of love. Twelve thousand dollars a month is a lot of cappuccino. And guess what? I don’t drink cappuccino. I never have. I called a real-estate broker and began to look at apartments. Unrequited love’s a bore, as Lorenz Hart once wrote. It had taken me significantly longer to come to that realization in the area of real estate than it ever had in the area of marriage, but I was finally, irrevocably there. Since my love affair with the building was one-sided, falling out of love was fairly uncomplicated. My children were grown and unable to voice the sorts of objections they had put forth during early exploratory conversations on the topic of moving, when they implored me not to leave the only home they’d ever known. My husband was up for anything. My sister was already on the street, looking for a new place, my sister—who had been quoted in the Times talking about the “heart and soul” of the Apthorp—was out there, cold-eyed, unsentimental, and threatening to move downtown. I called my accountant, who explained to me (as carefully as he had explained to me only a few years earlier that it made more sense to rent than to buy) that it made more sense to buy than to rent.

So we prepared to move. We threw away whole pieces of our lives: the Care Bears, the wire shelving in the basement storage room, the boxes of bank statements, the posters we hung on the walls when we were young, the stereo speakers that no longer worked, the first computer we ever bought, the snowboard, the surfboard, the drum kit, the Portafiles full of documents relating to movies never made. Boxes of clothing went to charity. Boxes of books went to libraries in homeless shelters. We felt cleansed. We’d got back to basics. We’d been forced to confront what we had outgrown, what we would no longer need, who we were. We had taken stock. It was as if we had died but got to sort through our things; it was as if we’d been reborn and were now able to start accumulating things all over again.

The new place was considerably smaller than the apartment in the Apthorp. It was on the Upper East Side, a neighborhood that on some level I had spent more than twenty years thinking of as the enemy of everything I held dear. It was nowhere near a Cuban-Chinese restaurant. But the fireplace worked, the doorman opened the door, and the Chinese food was delivered to your apartment. Within hours of moving in, I was at home. I was astonished. I was amazed. Most of all, I was mortified. I hadn’t been so mortified since the end of my marriage, and a great many of the things that went through my head apropos of that marriage went through my head now: Why hadn’t I left at the first whiff of the other woman’s perfume? Why hadn’t I realized how much of what I thought of as love was simply my own highly developed gift for making lemonade? What failure of imagination had caused me to forget that life was full of possibilities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?

On the other hand, I am never going to dream about this new apartment of mine.

At least, I haven’t so far.

And I am never going to feel romantic about the neighborhood—although I have to say that it’s much more appealing than I would have guessed. What’s more, it turns out to possess many of the things that made the Apthorp so wildly attractive—proximity to an all-night newsstand, an all-night Korean grocery, and even a twenty-four-hour Kinko’s. It’s spring now, and I can see out the window that the pear trees are in bloom, and they’re just beautiful. And, by the way, shopping for food is every bit as good on this side of town as it was on the West Side, it’s much closer to the airport, the subway is better, and I’ll tell you something else I’ve noticed about the East Side: it’s sunnier, it really is, I don’t know why, the light is just much lighter on the east side of town than the west. What’s more, it’s definitely warmer over here in winter, because it’s farther from the frigid blasts of wind coming off the Hudson River. And it’s much closer to all my doctors’ offices, which is something you have to think about at my age, I’m sorry to say. A block from here is a place that sells the most heavenly Greek yogurt, and a block in another direction is a restaurant I could eat in every night, that’s how good it is.

But it’s not love. It’s just where I live. ♦

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Reading: I hate my purse

Buy Nora Ephron’s book, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman , here .

I hate my purse. I absolutely hate it. If you’re one of those women who think there’s something great about purses, don’t even bother reading this because there will be nothing here for you. This is for women who hate their purses, who are bad at purses, who understand that their purses are reflections of negligent housekeeping, hopeless disorganization, a chronic inability to throw anything away, and an ongoing failure to handle the obligations of a demanding and difficult accessory (the obligation, for example, that it should in some way match what you’re wearing). This is for women whose purses are a 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 ten years, tampons that have come loose from their wrappings, English coins from a trip to London last October, boarding passes from long-forgotten airplane trips, hotel keys from God-knows-what hotel, leaky ballpoint pens, Kleenexes that either have or have not been used but there’s no way to be sure one way or another, scratched eyeglasses, an old tea bag, several crumpled personal checks that have come loose from the checkbook and are covered with smudge marks, and an unprotected toothbrush that looks as if it has been used to polish silver.

This is for women who in mid-July still haven’t bought a summer purse or who in midwinter are still carrying around a straw bag.

This is for women who find it appalling that a purse might cost five or six hundred dollars—never mind that top-of-the-line thing called a Birkin bag that costs ten thousand dollars, not that it’s relevant because you can’t even get on the waiting list for one. On the waiting list! For a purse! For a ten-thousand-dollar purse that will end up full of old Tic Tacs!

This is for those of you who understand, in short, that your purse is, in some absolutely horrible way, you. Or, as Louis XIV might have put it but didn’t because he was much too smart to have a purse, Le sac, c’est moi .

I realized many years ago that I was no good at purses, and for quite a while I managed to do without one. I was a freelance writer, and I spent most of my time at home. I didn’t need a purse to walk into my own kitchen. When I went out, usually at night, I frequently managed with only a lipstick, a twenty-dollar bill, and a credit card tucked into my pocket. That’s about all you can squeeze into an evening bag anyway, and it saved me a huge amount of money because I didn’t have to buy an evening bag. Evening bags, for reasons that are obscure unless you’re a Marxist, cost even more than regular bags.

But unfortunately, there were times when I needed to leave the house with more than the basics. I solved this problem by purchasing an overcoat with large pockets. This, I realize, turned my coat into a purse, but it was still better than carrying a purse. Anything is better than carrying a purse.

Photo credit: Robert Knudsen/White House Photographs/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

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I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other...

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller on January 22, 2011

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

Publication Date: August 1, 2006
Genres: Essays , Humor
Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN-10: 0307264556
ISBN-13: 9780307264558

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3 great essays by nora ephron.

A Few Words about Breasts - I was boyish. I wanted desperately not to be that way, not to be a mixture of both things, but instead just one, a girl. As soft and as pink as a nursery. And nothing would do that for me, I felt, but breasts..

The Graduate - It was gritty and glamorous and everything I’d been longing for—to begin my life in New York as a journalist…

On Maintenance - Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won’t have to hide behind a stack of canned food…

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The Oft-Examined Life

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By Alex Kuczynski

Nov. 26, 2010

Nora Ephron’s new book of essays is titled “I Remember Nothing,” but that’s a sop. She remembers everything, and while some of the material in this book is tantalizingly fresh and forthright, some of it we’ve seen before. Which doesn’t mean it’s not just as entertaining the second or even third time around, offered in each new iteration with a few more spicy details. Which is all just another way of saying: Does Carl Bernstein lie awake at night wondering how the hell his ex-wife of so many years ago (they were divorced in 1980) turned his marital indiscretion into a multimedia juggernaut spanning the decades?

I’ll get back to that.

“I Remember Nothing” is Ephron’s follow-up to “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” her 2006 best seller subtitled “And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.” They were really her thoughts on aging women, bulging handbags and sagging wattles, spliced into an entertaining, chatty memoir. In “I Remember Nothing,” we get more of the same, sometimes verbatim. Readers of “I Feel Bad About My Neck” will recall that Ephron was hired by The New York Post as a reporter in the early 1960s after writing a parody of the paper: “The editors of The Post are upset about the parody, but the publisher of The Post is amused. ‘If they can parody The Post, they can write for it,’ she says. ‘Hire them.’ ” In the new book, we get this: “The editors of The Post wanted to sue, but the publisher, Dorothy Schiff, said: ‘Don’t be ridiculous. If they can parody The Post they can write for it. Hire them.’ ”

In the last book, Ephron’s mother counsels, “Never ever buy a red coat.” In the new book, we hear her mother again: “Never buy a red coat.” Sometimes Ephron reuses phrases that, even years later, catch the eye — like “slough of despond.” (In the last book, the slough was encountered when cabbage strudel could not be located. In the new book, said slough is entered into when contemplating the Internet.)

In “I Remember Nothing,” Ephron plows through the events surrounding her divorce from Bernstein in an essay called “The D Word.” Again. Remember, she wrote a novel, “Heartburn,” about the philandering cad and their divorce, and then she wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation, in which she was played by Meryl Streep. She also wrote about the divorce in her previous book, and now we get some more about it in this one. But every time she gives us some new little bone to gnaw on. Ephron fans will recall the moment in “Heartburn” (the novel and the movie) when Rachel (really Ephron) goes to the Georgetown jeweler to have her ring reset and the jeweler asks her how she liked the necklace. Of course, that rascally husband hasn’t bought his wife a necklace while she was in the hospital giving birth to their second child; it’s a gift for his mistress.

In “I Remember Nothing,” we learn that in reality Ephron found a receipt from James Robinson Antiques (what a juicy piece of gossip! James Robinson Antiques: such a stuffy place to buy a gift for a mistress!) and called up pretending to be her husband’s assistant. She claimed she needed to know what Bernstein had bought so it could be insured. The clerk told her it was for an antique porcelain box inscribed with the words “I Love You Truly.”

They say books are very much like children. I wonder if Bernstein knew at the appropriate coital moment back in, oh, 1979 or so, exactly how many children he was unleashing upon the planet? Did he ever think it would be millions and millions — of copies, that is? Of essays and books and magazine articles and DVDs and audio books and e-books and Blu-ray discs? I’m beginning to feel for the guy.

But “I Remember Nothing” does at times give us more depth and gravity and an actual, almost gravely serious reflection on divorce, duplicity, disease. In “The D Word,” Ephron tells us she can’t think of anything good about divorce from the children’s perspective. “You can’t kid yourself about that,” she argues, “although many people do. They say things like, It’s better for the children not to grow up with their parents in an unhappy marriage. But unless the parents are beating each other up, or abusing the children, kids are better off if their parents are together. Children are much too young to shuttle between houses. They’re too young to handle the idea that the two people they love most in the world don’t love each other any more, if they ever did.”

The essays about her mother’s alcoholism and Ephron’s sense of betrayal by the writer Lillian Hellman cover previously uncharted territory and are also among the most thoughtful parts of the book. Eventually, she came to feel deceived by both: Hellman for a bit too brightly overpolishing her legends and Ephron’s mother for drinking herself to death at the age of 57. “For a long time before she died, I wished my mother were dead,” Ephron explains. “And then she died, and it wasn’t one of those things where I thought, Why did I think that? What was wrong with me? What kind of person would wish her mother dead? No, it wasn’t one of those things at all. My mother had become a complete nightmare.” Those are not easy words to write about the supermother who put The New Yorker’s Lillian Ross in her place. (Another wonderful story included in this collection.)

Apart from her penchant for repetition, my only quibble with Ephron is all this I-remember-nothing talk. How can we take it seriously from a woman who is a famous movie director, screenwriter, best-selling author, blogger and mother of two socialized, successful adult men? How can a woman who has been nominated for three Oscars complain about what an inadequate brain she has? Isn’t it sort of like Meg Ryan in “You’ve Got Mail” looking all rumpled and sneezing into the arm of her bathrobe — but rich and powerful Tom Hanks still falls in love with her? Who falls in love with a woman with a lousy temper and a dribbling nose who lives in a walk-up apartment that in real life probably smells of cat food? How can a woman who says she remembers nothing and can’t recognize her own sister get it together to direct movies and write all these books? It’s seems ungenuine, like the supermodel who says she never exercises and eats three cheeseburgers a day.

That’s right. There’s so much to love about Nora Ephron, but there’s just as much to hate about her. Famous people play her in movies; she directs famous people in the movies she writes. She’s happily married, as she also, only passingly (details! details!), reminds us in these books of hers. (She is married to the screenwriter Nick Pileggi, widely known to be a very nice, exceedingly accomplished person.) She looks amazingly good for an almost-septuagenarian — for anyone, any age, frankly — despite the flip of hair on the back of her head, a cowlick-turning-bald spot she refers to as “an Aruba.” For all those steaks cooked in butter and extra-egg-yolk omelets and chocolate cream pies she professes to enjoy, she’s got a trim figure.

But you can’t hate her. You love her. She’s self-effacing and brilliant. I use lines of hers all the time. Just the other day, my 1-year-old and I were playing with his kitchen set and he picked up the pretend pepper and said, “Pepper.” I held it over his pretend pot of stew and said, “Would you like some pepper with your paprikash?” It just came out. But it was so funny the way Billy Crystal said as much in “When Harry Met Sally” (written by Ephron, whose script earned one of those Oscar nominations). She’s like Benjamin Franklin or Shakespeare: her words are now part of the fabric of the English language. Whenever we talk about “white man’s overbite” — another one I use, or at least think, all the time — we’re quoting her.

Yes, there’s some rehashing here, but that’s what we expect — what we love — from Ephron. She’s familiar but funny, boldly outspoken yet simultaneously reassuring. In much of her work, we get a story about betrayal, but the heroine picks up and moves on. Death of a friend or family member? Look on the bright side: there might be an inheritance somewhere, or at least a corn bread pudding recipe. (Sorry, that was the last book. In this one, it’s a bread and butter pudding recipe.)

Let’s face it. When most of us get divorced, Meryl Streep is not going to play us in the movie version of our lives. Because there will be no movie version of our lives. But Ephron is the poster girl for the religion of When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade. And most of us can’t make lemonade — or corn bread pudding — the way she can.

I REMEMBER NOTHING

And other reflections.

By Nora Ephron

137 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $22.95

Alex Kuczynski is the author of “Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery.”

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In praise of … Nora Ephron's essays

F ew of the hundreds of books churned out by journos each year escape the pulp mill. That could be because they are yesterday's news. Or because there could be something even more ephemeral about the all-knowing, God-like persona too many of us adopt. Nora Ephron's essays are readable three decades on , even though their subjects are long forgotten. Name checks are few and far between for the cast of characters in Reagan's administration, let alone Richard Nixon's. But Ephron's writing lingers. She can eviscerate ("Washington is a city of important men and the women they married before they grew up"), as well as self-deprecate ("I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them"). But humour always wins out ("I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out"). Ephron was many things, not least a great essayist.

Nora Ephron
In praise of ...

‘I Remember Nothing’: Nora Ephron’s hilarious essays

Nora Ephron has done it all. The film director, producer, screenwriter, journalist and blogger is also an author, and her new book — “I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections” — is a collection of short, funny essays about everything from aging and divorce to journalism and technology. In this excerpted essay, Ephron directs her razor-sharp wit toward e-mail.

The six stages of e-mail

Stage one: Infatuation I just got e-mail! I can’t believe it! It’s so great! Here’s my handle. Write me. Who said letter-writing was dead? Were they ever wrong. I’m writing letters like crazy for the first time in years. I come home and ignore all my loved ones and go straight to the computer to make contact with total strangers. And how great is AOL? It’s so easy. It’s so friendly. It’s a community. Wheeeee! I’ve got mail!

Stage two: Clarification Okay, I’m starting to understand — e-mail isn’t letter-writing at all, it’s something else entirely. It was just invented, it was just born, and overnight it turns out to have a form and a set of rules and a language all its own. Not since the printing press. Not since television. It’s revolutionary. It’s life-altering. It’s shorthand. Cut to the chase. Get to the point. It saves so much time. It takes five seconds to accomplish in an e-mail something that takes five minutes on the telephone. The phone requires you to converse, to say things like hello and good-bye, to pretend to some semblance of interest in the person on the other end of the line. Worst of all, the phone occasionally forces you to make actual plans with the people you talk to — to suggest lunch or dinner — even if you have no desire whatsoever to see them. No danger of that with e-mail. E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know.

Stage three: Confusion I have done nothing to deserve any of this: Viagra!!!!! Best Web source for Vioxx. Spend a week in Cancún. Have a rich beautiful lawn. Astrid would like to be added as one of your friends. XXXXXXXVideos. Add three inches to the length of your penis. The Democratic National Committee needs you. Virus Alert. FW: This will make you laugh. FW: This is funny. FW: This is hilarious. FW: Grapes and raisins toxic for dogs. FW: Gabriel García Márquez’s Final Farewell. FW: Kurt Vonnegut’s Commencement Address. FW: The Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. AOL Member: We value your opinion. A message from Barack Obama. Find low mortgage payments, Nora. Nora, it’s your time to shine. Need to fight off bills, Nora? Yvette would like to be added as one of your friends. You have failed to establish a full connection to AOL.

Stage four: Disenchantment Help! I’m drowning. I have 112 unanswered e-mails. I’m a writer — imagine how many unanswered e-mails I would have if I had a real job. Imagine how much writing I could do if I didn’t have to answer all this e-mail. My eyes are dim. My wrist hurts. I can’t focus. Every time I start to write something, the e-mail icon starts bobbing up and down and I’m compelled to check whether anything good or interesting has arrived. It hasn’t. Still, it might, any second now. And yes, it’s true — I can do in a few seconds with e-mail what would take much longer on the phone, but most of my e-mails are from people who don’t have my phone number and would never call me in the first place. In the brief time it took me to write this paragraph, three more e-mails arrived. Now I have 115 unanswered e-mails. Strike that: 116. Glub glub glub glub glub.

Stage five: Accommodation Yes. No. Can’t. No way. Maybe. Doubtful. Sorry. So sorry. Thanks. No thanks. Out of town. OOT. Try me in a month. Try me in the fall. Try me in a year. [email protected] can now be reached at [email protected].

Stage six: Death Call me.

Excerpted with permission from “I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections” by Nora Ephron (Knopf, 2010).

Three Rules for Middle-Age Happiness

Gather friends and feed them, laugh in the face of calamity, and cut out all the things––people, jobs, body parts––that no longer serve you.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

“The only thing a uterus is good for after a certain point is causing pain and killing you. Why are we even talking about this?” Nora jams a fork into her chopped chicken salad, the one she insisted I order as well. “If your doctor says it needs to come out, yank it out.” Nora speaks her mind the way others breathe: an involuntary reflex, not a choice. (Obviously, all dialogue here, including my own, is recorded from the distortion field of memory.)

“But the uterus …” I say, spearing a slice of egg. “It’s so …”

“Symbolic?”

“Yes. Don’t roll your eyes.”

“I’m not rolling my eyes.” She leans in. “I’m trying to get you to face a, well, it’s not even a hard truth. It’s an easy one. Promise me the minute you leave this lunch you’ll pick up the phone and schedule the hysterectomy today. Not tomorrow. Today .”

“Why the rush?”

“Why the hesitation?” Nora has leukemia. She knows this. I do not.

Ten years earlier, Nora had cold-called my home, annoyed that she’d had to get my number through a friend. Throughout her life, if you dialed 411 and asked for her home number, you’d get it. “Why would you ever not be listed?” she’d said. “What if someone needs to get in touch with you?” But first she said, “Hi, Deb, this is Nora Ephron. I loved your memoir, and I’d like to take you out to lunch.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “And I’m Joan of Arc.” I assumed it was a friend, mimicking her voice. Nora was my superhero. Screenwriter, director, novelist, humorist, essayist, journalist—Nora did all the things I wanted to do but better, faster, stronger. I saw Heartburn three times when it first came out; When Harry Met Sally , too many times to count.

“No, Deb. This is Nora. And I’d like to invite you to lunch.”

I froze. It was her. Nora effing Ephron. On the other end of my phone. So what does one say to the woman whose work you’ve admired your entire life? For starters, not this: “Ummmm …”

“Are you still there?” said Nora.

A long, uncomfortable pause. “Sorry. Lunch. Yes!”

I’d been clutching a roll of bubble wrap when she called, staring at a wall of family photos that needed to come down. Our dark 1.5-bedroom was located over a parking garage that overheated every summer, rendering the kitchen tiles too hot for bare feet. Its windows framed the last stop of the M79 bus route. Buses idled there 24/7, blasting a toxic cloud of metaphor into the master bedroom.

Moving boxes were everywhere. My husband and I were eight years into our marriage, six years into parenthood, and five days away from seeing whether more light, air, and space could keep our marriage from collapsing. Our new living room, bright and fume-free, had an oblique view of the Twin Towers. Until it didn’t.

Now, a decade later, Nora’s my go-to person on every topic: Couches, she tells me, should be white; tables, round; emails, short; lunches, long. “You don’t need it anymore,” she says, still harping on about my uterus. “It served you well, but that part of your life is over.”

She’s right. I’m 45, I have three children––two teenagers and a preschooler––and I’m not planning on having any more. And yet: Who am I without my uterus?

“How great is this chicken salad?” says Nora.

“Delicious.”

Our lunches have become a monthly fixture, to which Nora often arrives bearing gifts with careful instructions for their use: Dr. Hauschka’s lemon oil (“Dump at least half a bottle in the bath water. Don’t skimp. If you like it, I’ll get you more”); a black cardigan from Zara (“I bought five of them, they were so cheap. You can wear it on your book tour. Look, the buttons look just like a Chanel”); a silver picture frame (“Black-and-white photos only. Color won’t work”).

“Won’t I feel like less of a woman without a uterus?” I ask.

“Oh, please.” Nora rolls her eyes again. “Would you rather not have a uterus or be dead? They go in with robots now. You’ll barely have a scar. So what is this adeno … How do you pronounce the thing you have?”

“Adenomyosis,” I say, Googling it on my phone to make sure I get the definition right: A chronic condition in which the lining of the uterus breaks through the muscle wall, causing extensive bleeding, increased risk of anemia, heavy cramping, and severe bloating.

“Sounds delightful. I see now why you’d want to keep it.”

I laugh. Then I sigh. I’ve been putting up with this disease for 16 years because, like most women who get adenomyosis (or endometriosis, its equally wily cousin), I had no idea I had it. “How are your periods?” my gynecologist would ask every year, and every year I would answer, “Heavy,” but with a tone that implied I had everything under control. Why didn’t I tell my doctor I had viselike cramps and slept on a doggy wee-wee pad half the month to catch the overflow?

Every woman in a paper robe, facing her doctor, knows she is silently being judged. “Come on! It can’t be that bad,” a doctor once told me, diagnosing a mild case of gas three hours before I had an emergency appendectomy.

I’d had painful and heavy periods since adolescence, but they grew exponentially worse after the birth of my first child, in 1995. It wasn’t until just after my annual checkup in 2011, however, that my general practitioner became alarmed. A woman is considered anemic when she has fewer than 12 grams of hemoglobin per deciliter of blood. I had seven. “This can’t be right,” my doctor said, staring at my results. “How are you even standing?”

I was sitting. “I’ve been a little tired.” ( I’m exhausted! )

“Are you able to work and take care of the kids?”

“I do my best.” ( Who else is going to do it? )

“Look,” said my doctor. “We can either hospitalize you every month for anemia or you can go ahead and get a hysterectomy. It’s your choice, but not really? I don’t think getting transfusions every month is a sustainable life choice.”

“Whatever it’s called,” says Nora, “I want you to promise me you’ll get that hysterectomy this year.” Also, she doesn’t like the paperback cover design for my new novel, a picture of a woman lying on a park bench with a book in her hand. “She looks dead. Like the book was so boring, it killed her. ”

“I can’t do this anymore,” I finally admit to Nora. I call her early, too distraught to elaborate, after a particularly disturbing interaction with my husband the previous night.

She’s at her house in East Hampton and reserves me a ticket on the jitney while we are still on the phone. “I’ll meet you at the bus stop. Don’t eat. I’m making lunch.” Five years earlier, when I’d called to say I couldn’t attend the baby shower she was throwing for me, because my prematurely contracting uterus and I were now on bed rest, she showed up at my apartment with a dozen lobsters, two homemade lemon-meringue pies, our mutual friends, and her sleeves rolled up to do the dishes when the party was over.

I’ve told no one but my shrink about the darker corners of my marriage, but when Nora picks me up, I unearth all of it. Every last bone. A few years earlier, my husband was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and although the diagnosis helped us understand both his lack of empathy and my anger over its absence, it’s one thing to comprehend the origins of our marital dysfunction and quite another to fix it. I still feel alone, unseen, and frequently gaslit; he still feels confused and hurt by my seething fury.

After the exorcism, Nora’s husband, Nick, joins us for lunch, placing his hands gently on his wife’s shoulders before kissing the top of her head. “Is this for real?” I say dubiously, air-circling their conjoined heads with my finger: Harry and Sally, in their golden years. “Is this as good as it seems?” My jealousy burns almost as brightly as my admiration.

“No,” says Nick. “It’s better.”

“Deb!” Nora laughs, standing up and walking to the kitchen counter. “He’s my third husband. If you can’t get it right by your third marriage, well … Come. Help me carry the salad to the table.” She slices thick slabs of peasant bread. “Are you staying over tonight?”

“I can’t,” I say. “I have to pick up my son at 5:30.”

Nora purses her lips. “Might his father be able to do that?”

“I’ll ask,” I say, knowing before dialing his number that the answer will be no.

“You know I’m here for you if you decide to pull the plug,” she tells me, “but please: Try to fix the marriage before taking any drastic measures. Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.” She scribbles the name and number of her friend Joyce, a Jungian therapist who treats couples at an impasse, on a scrap of paper. “Joyce is a genius,” she says. “Call her.”

Illustration of two uterus holding hands

December 2011

“You’re not eating,” says Nora.

“I had a big breakfast.” Stress has eaten my appetite. Anemia has eaten my red blood cells.

“No. Sorry. You are not allowed to add anorexia onto adeno … whatever it’s called. Did you schedule that surgery yet?”

“I can’t have a major operation right now. I’ll do it after my novel comes out.”

“What exactly are you worried about when you imagine going under the knife?” she asks.

“I’m not worried about going under the knife,” I say, moving the pieces of cucumber and chicken around on my plate like pawns on a chessboard. “I’m worried about the aftermath.” The day after my appendectomy, my husband had asked me to bring him a Sudafed for his runny nose, because my side of the bed was closer to the bathroom. I fiddle with my wedding band: a new tic.

Nora notices. She notices everything. “How are things going with Joyce?”

“Joyce is great.”

“And the marriage?

I sigh. Not wanting to disappoint her, but unable to find hopeful words. “About as healthy as my uterus.”

She pauses, weighing her words. “He doesn’t have Asperger’s, you know. I’m sure of it.”

“What? No, stop.” This is the only argument we will ever have in our 11-year friendship, the only time her well-earned confidence about always being right gets in the way of the truth.

“But he’s so at ease at our dinner parties,” she says. “And he truly seems to love you. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s a ruse, his ease,” I say. “It’s a survival skill. He knows how to watch and listen carefully and learn behaviors. He watched rom-coms, for example, to figure out how to woo me.”

“Seriously?” says Nora, rom-com auteur.

“More or less,” I say.

“Okay, fine. I’ll stop.” She gives me the dreaded Nora Stare™: a raised-eyebrow, chin-down, crooked-mouth rebuke. “But that doesn’t mean I think you’re right.”

I laugh. “I wouldn’t want you any other way.” I look across the table at this daughterless woman who has all but adopted me and several other women. Who never judges my actions but tries to understand. Who champions my work, even when it’s not going well, and loves my children as if they were her own. Who teaches me, by example, how to navigate the postreproductive half of my life: Gather friends in your home and feed them, laugh in the face of calamity, cut out all the things––people, jobs, body parts––that no longer serve you.

After lunch, she flags down a taxi. “Are you feeling okay?” I ask. She lives three blocks away. She always walks home.

“I’m fine,” she says. She shuts the door and rolls down the window. “Schedule that surgery already, please! And be nice to your husband. One more shot, okay? For my sake.”

“Okay, okay!” I watch the blur of yellow that is Nora disappear up Madison Avenue and set a date for my hysterectomy.

“I’m dying to see you,” I write Nora, the morning after my surgery, at the precise moment when she, unbeknownst to me, is the one doing the hard work of dying. “Wanted to see what your summer looks like so we can plan something in, I dunno, late July?”

Unusually, she does not write back. Or even call. I’m unnerved. She always responds to my emails within an hour or two, max.

The hysterectomy—which, just as Nora had predicted, was done with robot arms—had lasted a little more than eight hours. I’d woken up in recovery to the sounds of the nurses whispering: “Where’s the husband? Has anyone seen the husband? We can’t reach him. Is there another number?”

“What?” I said, suddenly cogent and in pain.

“We can’t find your husband,” said the unfamiliar faces now hovering over my head. “Is there anyone else we can call at this time?”

“Yes. Call Nora, please.”

“Who’s Nora?” said the nurse.

“Nora Ephron. She’s listed. Call 411. That’s E-p-h-r- …”

“She’s delirious,” the nurses whispered.

Back home, less than 24 hours after surgery, I beg my husband for a lunch that never comes, for quiet that never falls, for help with our older son, who’s stuck downstairs in a taxi without cash to pay the fare. “I’m watching a movie,” he yells from the TV room. “Can you do it?”

I end up screaming at him with so much force, a hernia pops out of one of my incisions. “That’s it. I want a divorce,” I say. Nora will understand. She has to. I’ll call her first thing tomorrow to tell her.

Instead, I’m awoken by a series of texts from a friend, asking if I’ve heard the news: Nora is gravely ill. What? I call Nora’s cellphone. She doesn’t pick up. I write her another email. She doesn’t respond. Her death is announced the next day. Her face is all over the TV, her voice all over the radio; I have to turn off both to keep from weeping.

Her husband invites her friends to their apartment to eat the chicken-salad sandwiches Nora herself picked out for the occasion. “Why didn’t she tell us?” we all ask one another.

She’d told almost no one about her cancer, including her sons, until the end. Which was odd, as she was the self-proclaimed Queen of Indiscretion. Years before it was public knowledge, she told me and anyone else who would listen that Deep Throat was the FBI agent Mark Felt. At a dinner party, when a friend asked Nora if she was working on a new movie, she said yes but she wasn’t allowed to talk about it. Then she proceeded to spill every last detail about Julie & Julia , including the fact that she’d just spoken to Meryl Streep about coming on as its lead. How could she have kept her own terminal illness a secret?

Back home, my teenage daughter stops me as I head into the bathroom. “Mom,” she says, “I need to tell you something really personal, but I’ve been worried about telling you while you’re recovering. I didn’t want to bother you. The coincidence is just too … weird.”

“Hit me,” I say.

“Okay, so, while you were in the hospital? Like, literally during the exact hours when they were removing your uterus?”

“I got my period.”

“What?!!! No!!! That’s so crazy! Congratulations!” I hug her. I kiss her. The torch has been passed. Life goes on. What comes out of me can only be described as craughing: that combination of crying and laughter. “Do you have everything you need? I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for that. Do you even know how to use a—”

“Mom! Oh my God, stop. Yes. I’m the last one of my friends to get it. They taught me everything.”

“Okay, okay, but promise me one thing,” I say, channeling Nora.

“Sure,” she says, “what?”

“Promise me you’ll never be afraid to talk to me about anything.”

“Oh my God, Mom. Chill. It’s just my period.”

“No, no!” I laugh. “I’m not talking about periods. I mean, like … anything.”

“Duh, of course,” she says, and suddenly it strikes me: Of course Nora told no one about her illness. The transmission of woes is a one-way street, from child to mother. A good mother doesn’t burden her children with her pain. She waits until it becomes so heavy, it either breaks her or kills her, whichever comes first.

This article was adapted from Deborah Copaken’s book Ladyparts: A Memoir .

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic .

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Nora Ephron's Hilarious Essay About Purses Proves That The ...
The Most Of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron, $20, Amazon. Again, we all know that this isn't just about purses. This is about the difference between having it all together, like the girl with the ...
I Feel Bad About My Neck, And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
I laughed hysterically when she described the state of her disheveled purse--how she managed to describe my own purse had me in tears. I loved her essay on "Rapture", describing how the books she loved transported her to another world. ... Nora Ephron This audiobook - read by the author - contains a collection of humorous essays written ...
I feel bad about my neck : and other thoughts on being a woman : Ephron
In this collection of essays, Nora Ephron shares with us her ups and downs in I Feel Bad About My Neck, a candid, hilarious look at women who are getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests, and life itself. ... I hate my purse -- Serial monogamy : a memoir -- On maintenance -- Blind as a bat ...
Excerpt: 'I Feel Bad About My Neck'
An excerpt from I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron, a collection of essays in which the screenwriter and novelist takes on the aging process with wit and wisdom.
'I Feel Bad About My Neck,' by Nora Ephron
July 27, 2006. A standout among the essays in Nora Ephron's "I Feel Bad About My Neck" is titled "On Maintenance.". It describes the bare minimum of costly, time-consuming beauty rituals ...
I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
Nora Ephron is back with this slim, delightful volume of short essays about what it's like to be a modern woman, particularly a woman "of a certain age." ... In the aptly titled "I Hate My Purse" she warns: "If you're one of those women who think there's something great about purses, don't even bother reading this because there will be nothing ...
I Feel Bad About My Neck Summary
In the fifteen essays collected in I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (2006), American author and filmmaker Nora Ephron explores a variety of themes through her unique lens as a woman of a certain age in twenty-first-century America. From biological changes to evolving relationships, from empty-nesting to the nature of life and death, Ephron utilizes her trademark ...
I Feel Bad About My Neck (Ephron)
Full Version. Print. Book Club Discussion Questions. 1. In "I Feel Bad About My Neck," Ephron writes that she avoids making truthful comments on how her friends look, even when they ask her directly [pp. 3-4]. Why is this a wise decision? She says, "the neck is a dead giveaway" [p. 5]. When women seek each other's opinions about how ...
I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron: 9780307276827
Ephron chronicles her life, but mostly she speaks frankly and uproariously about life as a woman of a certain age. Utterly courageous, wickedly funny, and unexpectedly moving in its truth telling, I Feel Bad About My Neck is an audiobook of wisdom, advice, and laugh-out-loud moments, a scrumptious, irresistible treat. Read An Excerpt.
I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora
Reading Group Guide "Wickedly witty. . . . Crackling sharp. . . . Fireworks shoot out [of this collection]." —The Boston Globe The introduction, discussion questions, and suggestions for further reading that follow are intended to enhance your group's discussion of I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron's disarming, intimate, frank, and often hilarious essays about coping—or failing to ...
I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora
Many of Nora's essays deal with food, and, in fact, she describes her forays into culinary cooking as a "love affair." ... Nora Ephron seems to imply that one should approach the "maintenance" of aging with some degree of acceptance of the inevitable - even humor. ... How often do you change your purse and why? 7. What is your favorite cookbook ...
I Feel Great About My Neck
The fourth essay in "I Feel Bad About My Neck" is titled "On Maintenance.". In it, Ephron describes every single beauty routine she subscribed to. This was nearly a decade before the ...
The Nora Ephron We Forget
August 15, 2022. Ephron, the subject of a new biography, was a deeply literary artist, obsessed with language's effect on human relations. Photograph by Jill Krementz. "I have spent a great ...
Reflection Essay: A Few Words About Breasts
Nora Ephron's essay, "A Few Words About Breasts" is a masterpiece in the realm of creative non-fiction. Based on her experiences of encountering the power of breasts, Nora manages to ...
Nora Ephron Critical Essays
Nora Ephron 1941-. American journalist, essayist, and editor. Ephron is a commentator on popular culture who brings a fresh, iconoclastic approach to contemporary topics. A feminist who is not ...
Moving On, a Love Story
By Nora Ephron. May 29, 2006. Illustration by Arnold Roth. Save this story. Save this story. In February, 1980, two months after the birth of my second child and the simultaneous end of my ...
Reading: I hate my purse
Reading: I hate my purse. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT May 6, 2015. Buy Nora Ephron's book, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, here . I hate my purse. I absolutely hate it. If you're one of those women who think there's something great about purses, don't even bother reading this because there will be nothing ...
I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
Nora Ephron is back with this slim, delightful volume of short essays about what it's like to be a modern woman, particularly a woman "of a certain age." No odes to Jimmy Choos and Birkin bags here. No long boozy discourses on unattainable men while drinking cosmopolitans.
3 Great Essays by Nora Ephron
3 Great Essays by Nora Ephron. A Few Words about Breasts - I was boyish. I wanted desperately not to be that way, not to be a mixture of both things, but instead just one, a girl. As soft and as pink as a nursery. And nothing would do that for me, I felt, but breasts.. The Graduate - It was gritty and glamorous and everything I'd been longing ...
I Remember Nothing
Nov. 26, 2010. Nora Ephron's new book of essays is titled "I Remember Nothing," but that's a sop. She remembers everything, and while some of the material in this book is tantalizingly ...
In praise of … Nora Ephron's essays
Nora Ephron's essays are readable three decades on, even though their subjects are long forgotten. Name checks are few and far between for the cast of characters in Reagan's administration, let ...
'I Remember Nothing': Nora Ephron's hilarious essays
Nora Ephron's new book is a collection of short, funny essays about everything from aging and divorce to journalism and technology. In this excerpt, Ephron directs her razor-sharp wit toward e-mail.
Nora Ephron's Rules for Middle-Age Happiness
Our dark 1.5-bedroom was located over a parking garage that overheated every summer, rendering the kitchen tiles too hot for bare feet. Its windows framed the last stop of the M79 bus route. Buses ...

This Nora Ephron Essay Is A Hilarious Reminder That It's OK To Not Have Your Life Totally Together

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