“Well, it’s just my point of view that turns out to be a bit cynical or funny, and that’s how I see things and that’s how they manifest as I write them. However, it’s not something I’m aware of. An article on a serious topic can be written a little lightly so that it doesn’t look too heavy. When asked about the importance of humor in your job, young Nora Ephron, one of the fashion journalists in the United States, commented, “Basically, you have to be confident to write down how you feel about something. The same attitude was given in 2006, which she published largely in a short on the cruelty of aging and other topics. continues in I Don’t Like My Neck (Asteroid Books), a collection of essays.
If humor is a crucial part of the Nora Ephron formula, immediacy is another key element why so many readers feel a strange complicity with the American author. When In 2019 The Guardian selected I Don’t Like My Neck as one of the best hundred books of the first years of the 21st century, especially at the bottom of the list, it was said about it: “Confident and self-critical even when writing about her apartment, she always manages to sound like your best friend.” The truth is, each of these texts seems to have been written by the most attractive woman you’ll never have a good dinner with. And it doesn’t matter if we won’t meet, because she’s better off than most people we know. It’s enough to read it to get close.
This rebirth of Nora Ephron in the Spanish publishing market is a fluke. I don’t like my neck, we should add to the publication he published only a few months ago, his latest book, I don’t feel feel (I don’t remember anything), and reprints of two always forgotten classics, Ensalada loca and Se wonderdo el pastel. Thanks to Anagram, it took its place in our bookstores. We’re not overflowing with writers who have an X-ray vision of everything human, from the mundane to the transcendent, and also know how to describe it in a way that makes you think you’re having the most fun and delicious conversation you can have. Don’t forget. As Ephron is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright, he never stopped being a journalist with a keen sense of observation, but dreamed of being like Dorothy Parker as a child – and fortunately, his dream came true.
Why is this book so special? For many reasons, as much as gestures of laughter and complicity, it starts at the reader. With brutal and contagious candor, Ephron admits to his divorce, his passionate and almost fanatical fondness for culinary gurus, his purse problems, and, incidentally, his pursuit of a very expensive Kelly from Hermés, to the point of wanting to share our little pains with him. a flamboyant and charming Paris-, her awkward relationship with Bill Clinton, her enjoyment of empty nest syndrome, and her passion for an apartment that few readers can afford, among many other issues; I don’t like my neck big theme, no matter how boring getting old and how late and useless the wisdom the years have given us turns out to be.
“After reading the articles about Mimi Fahnestock, I realized that I was probably the only young woman working in the White House who had not been hanged by President Kennedy. Maybe it was because of the perm, which was a really sad mistake. Maybe it was because of the way I dress in multicolored acrylic dresses that almost always look like they’re made from melted cheese. Maybe it was because I was Jewish. Don’t laugh: think about it… Think about the long, long list of women JFK has slept with. Were there any Jews? I do not think so. On the other hand, nothing may have happened between us for the simple reason that JFK saw that common sense was not my thing,” Ephron explains of his years as an intern at the legendary Camelot, which JFK founded during his brief stay at the White House. It is one of his classic confessions that he always portrays as brutally compassionate.If there is a “Lubitsch touch” there is also an “Ephron touch” and the previous paragraph is good proof of that.
It was perhaps exaggerated and generous that The Guardian included this book in 2019 among the hundred best works of the 21st century so far. The lightness of Nora Ephron’s writing is not something to be underestimated or taken lightly. Writing with such sharpness is not a common skill, I wish it was, because the world would be a funnier place.