Book Review: I Feel Bad About My Neck...

It’s the third week of school and I’m taking three classes. I’m actually enrolled in seven, but I can’t make up my mind on what to take. This results in me doing work for all seven classes and hoping that I’ll accidentally hit upon certainty.

Being that I have the course load of an engineer and the tortured mindset of a perfectionist, you can imagine how I felt when I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron arrived alongside my Econometrics textbook. You feel bad about your neck? I feel bad about my major, indecisiveness, neuroticism, and uncanny ability to resemble tragic characters from British literature. I also feel bad when, instead of reading the two hundred pages of Stendhal assigned for the next day, I start reading Ephron’s book.

I didn’t feel bad for long. The delightful collection of essays immediately puts you in a good mood; it is clever, fun and oh so refreshing. At one point Ephron describes reading as coming into reality after a day of making things up. I Feel Bad About My Neck makes it wonderfully clear that college is not the only reality. Mrs. Ephron goes on to intern at the White House for JFK, work for the Post and New York magazine, and write When Harry Met Sally, Silkwood and Sleepless in Seattle.

Ephron is at her best not when chronicling her professional experiences but when musing about the everyday. She calculates the amount of time wasted highlighting one’s hair, muses about falling in love with an apartment, and embarks on a quest to find the perfect cabbage strudel.
My favorite essay is entitled, “Serial Monogamy: A Memoir.” Ephron recalls her obsession with cooking, pouring all her energy into making dishes she can hardly pronounce. She then goes to dinner where simple southern food is served, realizes that her whole life has been a mistake, divorces her husbands, and paints her apartment beige. Could moments of annihilation be this amusing? Can you realize how wrong your decisions have been simply by tasting Lee Bailey’s crab apples?

There are more serious essays; in “Me and Bill: The End of Love,” Ephron touches upon her frustration with politics. In “Considering the Alternative,” Ephron discusses losing one’s friends and the uncertainties of getting older. The most endearing quality of I Feel Bad About My Neck is however the good humor of the work. Ephron employs the perfect combination of insight and wit to relay that things are far more amusing than they seem. Adopting Ephron’s quotation of E. L. Doctorow to suit her own work, one can say that the distinction between comedy and tragedy becomes a matter of narrative.

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