Not the same old thing

BEFORE Nora Ephron the director, or Nora Ephron the screenwriter, or even before Nora Ephron the novelist, there was Nora Ephron the journalist and essayist. That Nora Ephron, known for her wit, candor and vulnerability, has returned and is holding forth in “I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.” The slender volume of essays debuted this week at No. 4 on the New York Times bestseller list.

Sales have been brisk, no doubt because it’s the kind of book women don’t get only for themselves; they purchase copies for their best friends and sisters, and buy more to be given as birthday gifts and party favors. Women who find themselves somewhere between the arrival of their first wrinkle and death have to hear only the title to get the message. They get that she gets it, and thank God for that. Ephron is a happily married, successful writer-director with grown children who aren’t doing eight to 20 upstate, so when she whimpers about the indignities and annoyances that accompany getting older, readers who have followed the high highs and low lows of her life know that her rants are dependably free of bitterness.

But she does feel bad about her neck. And about needing reading glasses. And about having to spend so much time on personal maintenance, just to avoid looking like someone who no longer cares, that it’s practically a second career. Make no mistake, though, she does not hate her neck. She hates her purse, hence the second essay in the book, called “I Hate My Purse.”

Ephron’s purse, resting beside her in a booth at the Beverly Hills Hotel Cabana Club Cafe on a toasty August day, was a smart, woven straw tote in shades of brown and tan. Even in bright sunlight, her neck looked pretty good, better than many 65-year-old necks. Although one of her firmly held beliefs is that after 60, life should not be lived without a collection of turtleneck sweaters, her exposed neck was adorned with tiny pearls spaced along a delicate golden chain. Her face was unlined (thanks, as she reports in the book, to her dermatologist and the miracle of cosmetic fillers), her hair looked casually terrific (it should, considering how long coloring and styling it takes). Her teeth were beautiful (they should be, since the cost of making them camera-ready white approximates the price of a Jeep Wrangler). All these pursuits she cheerfully classifies as “pathetic attempts to turn back the clock.”

But at least she’s honest about the quest, and the psychological succotash that propels it. That’s more than can be said about the chorus of cheerleaders currently glorifying aging in print: Gail Sheehy, for example, who wrote in “Sex and the Seasoned Woman,” published earlier this year, that “women of 50 and over are ... enjoying a resurgence of desire for romance and sex, and actively pursuing new dreams and passions to enliven the many decades they have ahead.” Menopause, to Sheehy, “gives women a chance ... to seize the day.”

Behind Ephron’s sunglasses, her eyes may well have been rolling at the mention of Sheehy (whom she hasn’t read), and other feel-good blatherers. She wrote “I Feel Bad” as an antidote to such poppycock, when she noticed that nobody else was telling the truth.

“There was this avalanche of books full of unrelenting boosterism about how fabulous it is to be older,” she said. “I thought, how weird is this that no one is saying how complicated and confusing and sad it is? If I write that, will it be too depressing? I forgot while asking that question that I usually write things from the point of view of someone who tries to make a joke now and then.”

The collection of short pieces was conceived as a book. Many of the essays appeared in the New York Times and in magazines, but the whole book was completed before the magazine rights to those essays were sold. It’s a chance to revisit Ephron’s life -- her Hollywood childhood as the daughter of screenwriters Henry and Phoebe Ephron, her early days in New York as a magazine writer, when her obsession with cooking was born, her lemon of a second marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein, squeezed into lemonade in her novel, “Heartburn,” and the movie based on it.

“Nora is such a great observer,” said film producer Lynda Obst, who has known her since the ‘70s. “People will talk about how funny the book is, but it’s really deep. Aging is such a mixed bag of major and minor keys and she captures them all.”

The refusal to age cheerfully and naturally is at the heart of Ephron’s first paradox, a twisted variation of the old joke about the restaurant this guy hates to go to, because the food is terrible, and the portions are too small. “The dilemma of getting older,” she said, “is you really do worry about this stuff” -- meaning gray hair and a wrinkled neck -- “but you’re also happy to be here. It is not entirely terrible being older, and I can make jokes about things that are better about it. I mention them grudgingly, because on balance, I just don’t believe it.” She offered one benefit: “You feel fantastically wise, you just can’t remember anyone’s name. So it’s this ridiculous combination of feeling fantastically wise and foolish.”

Since Ephron is known more for the comedies she has written and directed -- “Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail” -- than for the often political blog she contributes to the Huffington Post, she isn’t usually credited with gravitas. Writing “I Feel Bad” might have provided more fodder for people ready to dismiss her as shallow. “I just get very irritated when people say, ‘Is what you’re thinking about really your neck?’ No, it’s not all I’m thinking about. I always love doing fluff, and I’ve done a huge amount of it in my life and I’m very unapologetic about it. But that’s not all I’ve ever done. I wrote a lot of serious pieces about the women’s movement.”

Life is too short, Ephron feels, to worry about whether people agree with her opinions, or even think the recipe for no-carb ricotta pancakes she posted in a blog is as wonderful as she does. “A whole other great thing about age is you do get a lot mellower about some things,” she said. “I don’t have any sort of position against people trying to make themselves look better.” When Ephron was promoting the book on a radio show, she said, a lot of people called in to say that anyone who doesn’t color her hair deserves a medal. Ephron got cranky. “I just can’t stand people who think there’s some virtue in that,” she said. “If you look good with your hair gray, keep it. Most people don’t.”

The subject of feeling guilty for taking preemptive strikes against nature brings Ephron to paradox No. 2. “If you’re a woman,” she said, “there’s this constant sense that all this freedom has come along to make people feel slightly worse. The classic example is childbirth, where what is meant to set you free, Lamaze, became something you had to be good at. If you couldn’t do it, even before you’d given birth, you’d failed, in some way. All this stuff about what fabulous sex you’re going to have when you get old. If you’ve had fabulous sex, you certainly know that while you can have a very nice sex life when you get older, it’s just not true. I’m mystified by this.”

The alternative to feeling inadequate, depressed or resigned is action. In the August issue of Vogue, an excerpt from “I Feel Bad” keeps company with stories on how to make over ugly feet, buy a prettier smile and banish varicose veins. Ephron simultaneously embraces and laughs at how women subscribe to the myth of our own perfectibility. She calls it denial. “Doing some of the things you can do to make yourself look younger buys you a little bit of time in the acceptance of aging department,” she said. “You’re putting off the acceptance of being 60 or 65 by looking 58.”

It was time for Ephron to drive home, to the house in the hills she and her husband of 19 years, writer Nicholas Pileggi, bought two years ago. “We accidentally bought it,” she said. “We couldn’t quite get over that we did it, since I grew up right here in Beverly Hills and couldn’t wait to get out and think of myself as this hopeless New Yorker. I love our house here. I just adore it. We still live in New York, but we come out whenever we can.” Her 26-year old son lives here. He’s a musician and songwriter. His 27-year-old brother is a journalist in New York. Glimpses of her life as a parent are in the book, in a send-up of the military-industrial parenting complex. . “That’s a whole other area no one tells the truth about. Why is that?”

So many questions. As Ephron admits in the book’s final essay, an elegy for her late best friend, who made divine bread pudding and died last November, the unanswerable questions and continuing complaints and conversation -- at some point, they’re all just dancing around the D word.

There’s a conversation-stopper: Death. Loss. Grief. Regret.

Ephron has some of the latter, but it pains her less than it might whenever she remembers her mother’s words of wisdom: “Everything is copy.”

“I don’t think everyone should go around dwelling on their grief and regret,” she said, “about friends, about your own life, about the things you didn’t do. But it’s there. And it does sneak up on you. Everyone always thinks there’s some law that if you say you regret something, you have to, for example, give back your children to the Morgan Freeman figure who gets to decide whether you get to do anything over again and what the price is.... I absolutely do regret all sorts of things that have turned out to have excellent consequences. I wouldn’t have my house in East Hampton, which I like very much, if I hadn’t written ‘Heartburn,’ which I never would have written if I hadn’t married Carl, which I should never have done. And that’s just the house. I’m not even talking about my absolutely beloved kids.”

That is the essence of the idea that “everything is copy.”

“It isn’t only a useful rule for writers, it’s a useful rule for everyone. You’ll be able to turn whatever happens into a story in which you aren’t the victim, but you’re the hero. Many of the things that seem like tragedies, turn into the best thing that ever happened.”

Then she smiled, revealing her very lovely and expensive teeth, and said, “I’m extremely grateful to my second husband for basically destroying our marriage.”