Nora Ephron: I Feel Bad about my Neck (and other thoughts on beng a woman)

As revealed in the title, I am not the particular target audience for a book of this sort.  There was a lot to which I can't relate and have no particular affinity.  But it so happens that the overlap between aging as a female and aging as a gay male is wider (or perhaps as wide as) one would expect.  In particular, the essays "On Maintenance" and "I My Purse" poignantly capture all that is involved in feeling like a human at a certain age.  Although still a few decades away from Ephron's perspective, it is clear that simply letting nature take its course is a recipe for solitude  One can rail against the reality that demands I lose weight, moisturize, and dye, or one can take the necessary steps to satisfy the desire that has become its own agent and its own fuel.

As Ephron embraces the gloomy, lonely reality of aging, she inadvertently gives with one hand the hope that she snatches away with the other.  Yes, aging is a dreary process, not golden in the ways that some would have you believe.  And this is especially true when one faces them alone.  But somehow, the possibility that although some things are now forever visible only in the rear view mirror, other things are to be discovered at one's elbow: truth, insight, wisdom, and--it is to be hoped--one's own self.