Ephron is an best known as a screenwriter and director (“Sleepless in Seattle” and “Julie & Julia”) but, as a woman of a certain age, I really enjoy her essays on life and aging including I Feel Bad About My Neck and now I Remember Nothing. It is very apparent the baby boomer generation, now hitting their sixth and seventh decades, is concerned about the inevitable physical waning associated with aging; just look at all the miracle supplements which are supposed to lift, energize and help retain a youthful vigor. Ephron writes, “I am old. I am sixty-nine years old. I’m not really old of course. Really old is eighty. But if you are young, you would definitely think I am old.” She writes about the body’s changes including the droops, the spots and the elbows that would horrify you if you could actually ever see them. And she writes about the number of pills she has to take every morning — so many, in fact, that she is then too full to eat breakfast.

One of my favorite essays is the first chapter about memory. Ephron writes, “I am living in the Google years, no question of that... When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment., and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn’t it?...There’s none of the nightmare of the true Senior Moment — the long search for the answer, the guessing, the self-recrimination, the head-slapping mystification, the frustrated finger-snapping. You just go to Google and retrieve it.” So, be honest, how many times have you thanked God for Google?

I also loved the chapter on “The Six Stages of Email”. Similar to Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief, Ephron has designated six emotional responses to handling email beginning with “Infatuation” and ending with “Death.” Too funny!
A fun and often thoughtful book, it would also be a perfect gift for a woman of a certain age. ~Patti