What's so damn great about aging?

Crackling good writer and "Sleepless in Seattle" director Nora Ephron gets serious about sagging necks and wrinkles, transforming her family life into fiction, and why her movies aren't as stupid or schmaltzy as people say.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Hollywood, Books, Memoirs, Books Features, Rebecca Traister

Photo by Michael Stuparyk/Toronto Star/ZUMA Press

Nora Ephron

Aug. 8, 2006 | For 40 years, Nora Ephron has been a wicked social critic and storyteller, spotting and eviscerating trends, spinning somber tales into comic gold, and revivifying a moribund cinematic genre -- the romantic comedy -- for a country still trying to recover from the sexual revolution. She began her writing career in the '60s as a reporter for the New York Post and covered the media, fashion and women's issues for Esquire and New York magazines in the '70s. In 1983 she wrote the novel "Heartburn" and then adapted it for film; soon she was penning Oscar-nominated scripts for "Silkwood" and "When Harry Met Sally," and by the time the '90s rolled in, she had largely abandoned journalism for Hollywood, directing and producing movies like "Sleepless in Seattle," "You've Got Mail" and "Bewitched." It was in this last stage of her career that Ephron became most famous; these starry, heavily soundtracked films are also what got her labeled schmaltzy.

Yet while she has surely trafficked in some synthetic twinkle, Ephron is no sap. In fact, in much of her work, she is a lot like her beloved Manhattan: protean, resilient, sharp, eager to crack a grim smile in bad times, susceptible to big-strings romanticism, but often willing to resist -- yes, resist -- sentimentality in the face of change.

Nowhere is this Ephron more evident than in her new book, "I Feel Bad About My Neck," a collection of wry essays about time's dark march -- across the skin on her neck, across New York City's rent-control guidelines and across her circle of friends. "Every so often I read a book about age, and whoever's writing it says it's great to be old," Ephron writes. "It's great to be wise and sage and mellow; it's great to be at the point where you understand just what matters in life. I can't stand people who say things like this. What can they be thinking? Don't they have necks?" While she understands that aging beats the alternative, Nora Ephron does not think it's great to be old. She thinks it sucks.

We met recently at a French restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Despite the protestations in her book, Ephron looks great at 65. She was dressed in a high-collared button-down shirt, but from what I could tell, her neck doesn't look half bad. In fact, and not just because of her colored hair, she simply doesn't look her age. While she claims in the book not to have had a face-lift for fear of winding up with a face that "looks suspiciously like a drum pad," her cheeks are lineless.

Over lunch -- at which the food-obsessed Ephron and I shared croque-monsieur, tomato salad, a pork sausage and sauerkraut sandwich, steak tartare and lots of frites -- the author explained that she first had the idea for "I Feel Bad About My Neck" when she went through menopause, an event that took her by surprise. "You realize that you actually thought you were going to be the only person who didn't go through menopause," she said. After she turned 60 -- with a blowout party in Vegas -- she wrote the book's titular piece. In it, she explains that her neck began to go in her early 40s, after an operation near her collarbone left a scar.

"Even if you are being operated on for something serious or potentially serious," she writes. "Even if you honestly believe that your health is more important than vanity, even if you wake up in the hospital room thrilled beyond imagining that it wasn't cancer, even if you feel elated, grateful to be alive, full of blinding insight about what's important and what's not, even if you vow to be eternally joyful about being on the planet Earth and promise never to complain about anything ever again, I promise you that one day soon, sooner than you can imagine, you will look in the mirror and think, I hate this scar."

After finishing this essay, Ephron said, she knew there was a funny book in getting older. She made a list of other topics to write about, and then simply went to work. She wrote about her hatred of her purse, "a morass of loose Tic Tacs, solitary Advils, lipsticks without tops, ChapSticks of unknown vintage, little bits of tobacco even though there has been no smoking going on for at least ten years, tampons that have come loose from their wrappings, English coins from a trip to London last October...," and about her search for cabbage strudel, a dish that disappeared from New York for more than a decade and then reappeared at a bakery two blocks from our lunch place (and where Ephron and I split an apple strudel after our meal). She wrote about falling out of love with Bill Clinton, and about her college internship in the Kennedy White House, where JFK failed to make a pass at her. "Perhaps nothing happened between us because JFK somehow sensed that discretion was not my middle name," she writes.

The book also details her personal maintenance, including her wise observation that the "reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to [is] not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye." The collection closes with a mournful piece about the death of her best friend, in which she observes, "The honest truth is that it's sad to be over sixty. The long shadows are everywhere -- friends dying and battling illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones ... There are, in short, regrets."

Luckily for Ephron, as she writes in that same essay, most of her mistakes turned out to be things she "survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from." This is something of an understatement from a woman whose talent for transforming the highs, lows and dull in-between bits of life into cash-generating narrative seems to have been imparted into her genetic code.

The eldest of four daughters of screenwriting team Phoebe and Henry Ephron ("Carousel," "Desk Set") Nora was depicted as an infant in their play "Three's a Family." Her early years at Wellesley were the basis for their 1961 play "Take Her, She's Mine," which was adapted for film with Sandra Dee as the daughter. Ephron's childhood and young adulthood feature prominently in her father's memoir, "We Thought We Could Do Anything." It wasn't long till Ephron began telling her own personal stories, memorably penning "A Few Words About Breasts," a 1972 piece about having small ones ("Buster Klepper was the first boy who ever touched them") for Esquire. Later, in her Esquire column, she also chronicled her attempts to save her first marriage, a six-year union with novelist Dan Greenburg, by entering a consciousness-raising group in the '70s. "That was during the women's movement. Everybody was writing about their marriages during the women's movement," she said over lunch.

Next page: She knows that at any moment her offspring could turn their pens on her