January 29, 2007
Ephron's eclectic essays about life as an older woman certainly provide humor and insight into the lives of sexagenarians who have spent most of their lives as city girls. She both mocks and embraces the lifestyle she has maintained over the past decades. Whether she is waxing poetic about the rituals of everyday life, her love-hate relationship with purses, her affinity for celebrity chefs or her obsession over her apartment, Ephron delivers this audiobook in the spirited tone of one who is at peace with the life she has lived. Her gentle comedic delivery of punch lines will evoke smiles in listeners. While her sincerity at times clashes with her sarcasm, causing the listener to pause and determine what she meant, she still produces moments where her positive energy summons up a picture of her smiling as she reads into the microphone. Ephron's writing style lends weight to these brief trysts into the personal and worldly, strange and mundane aspects of her life. But mostly, her voice evokes the image of a serene and wise woman providing her insights. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, June 6).
June 5, 2006
Reviewed by Toni Bentley
The honest truth is that it's sad to be over sixty," concludes Nora Ephron in her sparkling new book about aging. With 15 essays in 160 pages, this collection is short, a thoughtful concession to pre- and post-menopausal women (who else is there?), like herself, who "can't read a word on the pill bottle," follow a thought to a conclusion, or remember the thought after not being able to read the pill bottle. Ephron drives the truth home like a nail in your soon-to-be-bought coffin: "Plus, you can't wear a bikini." But just as despair sets in, she admits to using "quite a lot of bath oil... I'm as smooth as silk." Yes, she is. This is aging lite—but that might be the answer. Besides, there's always Philip Roth for aging heavy.
Ephron, in fact, offers a brief anecdote about Roth, in a chapter on cooking, concerning her friend Jane, who had a one-night stand, long ago, with the then "up-and-coming" writer. He gave Jane a copy of his latest book. "Take one on your way out," he said. Conveniently, there was a box of them by the front door. Ephron refuses to analyze—one of her most refreshing qualities—and quickly moves on to Jane's céleri remoulade
.
Aging, according to Ephron, is one big descent—and who would argue? (Well, okay—but they'd lose the argument if they all got naked.) There it is, the steady spiraling down of everything: body and mind, breasts and balls, dragging one's self-respect behind them. Ephron's witty riffs on these distractions are a delightful antidote to the prevailing belief that everything can be held up with surgical scaffolding and the drugs of denial. Nothing, in the end, prevents the descent.
While signs of mortality proliferate, Ephron offers a rebuttal of consequence: an intelligent, alert, entertaining perspective that does not take itself too seriously. (If you can't laugh, after all, you are already, technically speaking, dead.) She does, however, concede that hair maintenance—styling, dyeing, highlighting, blow-drying—is a serious matter, not to mention the expense. "Once I picked up a copy of Vogue
while having my hair done, and it cost me twenty thousand dollars. But you should see my teeth."
Digging deeper, she discovers that your filthy, bulging purse containing numerous things you don't need—and couldn't find if you did—is, "in some absolutely horrible way, you." Ephron doesn't shy away from the truth about sex either, and confesses, though with an appropriate amount of shame, that despite having been a White House intern in 1961, she did not have an affair with JFK. May Ephron, and her purse, endure so she can continue to tell us how it goes. Or, at least, where it went.
Toni Bentley is the author, most recently, of
Sisters of Salome and
The Surrender, an Erotic Memoir. She is writing about Emma, Lady Hamilton, for the Eminent Lives series.