Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(182)
4 star:		(80)
3 star:		(45)
2 star:		(35)
1 star:		(48)

 

 

Nora Ephron is witty, clever and has her finger on the pulse of American women everywhere in her delightful book, I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman. My only complaint is that at 137 pages (and small pages at that), it's a rather lightweight book.

Ephron writes about so many of the problems we women face: hairstyles, maintenance routines, raising children, empty nesting, reading glasses, cooking, purses, living in New York City, aging, and the death of good friends. Some of her observations are brutally honest. She talks about how a neck is a telltale sign of aging. "The neck is a dead giveaway. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn't have to do that if it had a neck." She has a refreshing list of "What I Wish I'd Known" including "Never marry a man you wouldn't want to be divorced from" and "The empty nest is underrated."

I' m not real big on make-up routines, I wear glasses all the time and love my poker-straight hair. So some of her musings I found funny but didn't necessarily relate. But where Ephron and I see eye to eye is about reading. "Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person." One of my favorite chapters is "On Rapture," about the state of rapture she feels when she discovers a good book. She also lists some books that changed her life. The chapters where she discusses reading are the best in the book.

I Feel Bad About My Neck got raves from most of the book critics that reviewed this book. While I enjoyed it, I just was expecting more from Ephron.

I've loved Nora Ephron ever since Sleepless In Seattle and You've Got Mail. Heartburn (which she wrote) turned into a hit film, and so I knew when I saw that she wrote another book again, I thought I'd pick it up. It's a collection of amusing essays all about growing older.
She says that there are so many books out there about what to do after menopause etc, but none addressed your neck change as you age so she thought this was a cute and funny title.
She talks about maintenance being a second career because a lot of women are pre-empting age. For example, hair dying, botox etc. She talks about her husbands theory of women either being birds, muffins or horses and that is the shape of your face. If you are a muffin, you can have a zillion face lifts and be fine, but other shaped faces - not so much.
She talks more seriously about reaching 60 and start loosing friends. You have to come to grips with reality and realise that we aren't invincible and won't die - it's getting closer to being on the cards.
She also mentions things she wishes she'd known; You can't be friends with people who call after 11pm, Write everything down, Back up your files etc. She's very funny (a very dry sense of humour) and it shows through this book. It's a good read that is sometimes serious but overall will be thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining. If you are a fan of her movies, you will definately love I Feel Bad About My Neck ...

I was ready for some light reading and selected this title because of its allusion to how tiresome it is to put up with the "one down" role women carry in society. It turned out to be a self-centered litany of unfunny situations.

I am sorry I wasted my money on this book. I looked forward to reading this book and bought it the first day it was available. I am fifty and thought I could use a light read and a little laughter. What I ended up with were the boring ramblings of Nora's life. I felt like she threw together a few days of journaling and published it. I didn't laugh out loud once. Let's be real we have all heard funny stories about hair in wrong places and mid life short term memory. I kept waiting for something funny and it just went on and on and on.......

Maybe it's just me, but I expected so much more from this book. I thought it would be wittier, more original, and use humor to inspire middle aged women like me. Instead I found it to be a negative read and it just brought me down. Sorry, no recommendation from me on this one.

A few chapters were amusing. It started out promising. But, I would recommend borrowing this from a library. There's only a few funny parts in the book. The rest of it was boring and I didn't identify with her life in NYC/High Maintenance Beauty thing/Gourmet Cooking ramblings. Like others have said, it is a fast read, but not always an interesting one.

I'm annoyed with myself that I paid over ten bucks at Sam's for something that I read in one sitting and that offered minimal humor and little insight into aging or anything else. Just about any woman of a certain age with some writing skill could have written this slim book -- though most could not have written the irrelevant, boring, and overlong section on the travails of owning an apartment in New York. But an unknown author with the same skills and ideas would not have had such a skimpy book published. Nora Ephron is a very funny woman who writes charming screenplays and articles, but as another reviewer pointed out, once you've heard her speak you don't need to read this book.

I read the first 50 pages and was bored out of my mind as well as appalled at the content. Obviously this woman and the women who like this stuff have no self-esteem to think of their lives as more than hours of waxing and makeup and PURSES. My god, get over it and start living a life. I'll continue my life by not finishing this book - I have better things to do with my time that to waste it on women who waste their lives.

I wish I had read some of the reviews before wasting valuable summer reading time and money on this. It seemed like endless pages (amazingly only 139) of complaining about things that are well within someone of her means control. If it is such a burden to keep your hair dyed, stop dying it and learn to love it gray. Hey, you know what, if you're over 60 we all know that its not your real hair color anyway. No one cares if you hate the time it takes to get a manicure, most of us don't care or will never see your manicure, please don't bore us any further with your petty whining. This book depressed me. Thankfully the next book on my reading list was Jen Lancaster-now she was funny, same topics, appartment hunting in the big city, hair dying, but way, way funnier.

While the author may be a respected writer, this book is a poor example of her work. She rambles on about nothing, drops names and brags about herself and her finances. Where are her "thoughts on being a woman" when she rambles on about her high priced apartment? It was not insightful, not funny and really not what I expected.