I don't read parenting books

And other links for your Sunday

This week, I read Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck. Like all of Ephron’s writing, it is so funny and enjoyable and I laughed out loud so many times, especially when she was talking about her relationships with her apartments and her quest for the cabbage strudel. But the book is also a relic of a time when the punchline for women was that they were old and fat or worried about being old and fat. Or sad that they had become old and fat.

Rather than a book about aging, it feels like a lament to being able to easily achieve a body standard that wasn’t ever truly achievable in the first place. Ephron will have very witty commentaries about lettuce. And then say things like women over 50 can’t wear tank tops. According to whom, Nora? She also has this bit about how every woman should wear a bikini from 26-35 and then retire it. And, how? What? I mean wear what you want, but I love my bikini’s now more than ever. (I am 41.)

She’ll have an insightful quip about parenting and then say that the real travesty of homeless women is their pot bellies and bad skin. NORA! Come on!