I remember nothing And other reflections

Review by New York Times Review

Nora Ephron finds new lessons in familar tales of divorce, her mother's alcoholism and Hollywood success. NORA EPHRON'S new book of essays is titled "I Remember Nothing," but that's a sop. She remembers everything, and while some of the material in this book is tantalizingly fresh and forthright, some of it we've seen before. Which doesn't mean it's not just as entertaining the second or even third time around, offered in each new iteration with a few more spicy details. Which is all just another way of saying: Does Carl Bernstein lie awake at night wondering how the hell his ex-wife of so many years ago (they were divorced in 1980) turned his marital indiscretion into a multimedia juggernaut spanning the decades? I'll get back to that. "I Remember Nothing" is Ephron's follow-up to "I Feel Bad About My Neck," her 2006 best seller subtitled "And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman." They were really her thoughts on aging women, bulging handbags and sagging wattles, spliced into an entertaining, chatty memoir. In "I Remember Nothing," we get more of the same, sometimes verbatim. Readers of "I Feel Bad About My Neck" will recall that Ephron was hired by The New York Post as a reporter in the early 1960s after writing a parody of the paper: "The editors of The Post are upset about the parody, but the publisher of The Post is amused. 'If they can parody The Post, they can write for it,' she says. 'Hire them.'" In the new book, we get this: "The editors of The Post wanted to sue, but the publisher, Dorothy Schiff, said: 'Don't be ridiculous. If they can parody The Post they can write for it. Hire them.'" In the last book, Ephron's mother counsels, "Never ever buy a red coat." In the new book, we hear her mother again: "Never buy a red coat." Sometimes Ephron reuses phrases that, even years later, catch the eye - like "slough of despond." (In the last book, the slough was encountered when cabbage strudel could not be located. In the new book, said slough is entered into when contemplating the Internet.) In "I Remember Nothing," Ephron plows through the events surrounding her divorce from Bernstein in an essay called "The D Word." Again. Remember, she wrote a novel, "Heartburn," about the philandering cad and their divorce, and then she wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation, in which she was played by Meryl Streep. She also wrote about the divorce in her previous book, and now we get some more about it in this one. But every time she gives us some new little bone to gnaw on. Ephron fans will recall the moment in "Heartburn" (the novel and the movie) when Rachel (really Ephron) goes to the Georgetown jeweler to have her ring reset and the jeweler asks her how she liked the necklace. Of course, that rascally husband hasn't bought his wife a necklace while she was in the hospital giving birth to their second child; it's a gift for his mistress. In "I Remember Nothing," we learn that in reality Ephron found a receipt from James Robinson Antiques (what a juicy piece of gossip! James Robinson Antiques: such a stuffy place to buy a gift for a mistress!) and called up pretending to be her husband's assistant. She claimed she needed to know what Bernstein had bought so it could be insured. The clerk told her it was for an antique porcelain box inscribed with the words "I Love You Truly." THEY say books are very much like children. I wonder if Bernstein knew at the appropriate coital moment back in, oh, 1979 or so, exactly how many children he was unleashing upon the planet? Did he ever think it would be millions and millions - of copies, that is? Of essays and books and magazine articles and DVDs and audio books and e-books and Blu-ray discs? I'm beginning to feel for the guy. But "I Remember Nothing" does at times give us more depth and gravity and an actual, almost gravely serious reflection on divorce, duplicity, disease. In "The D Word," Ephron tells us she can't think of anything good about divorce from the children's perspective. "You can't kid yourself about that," she argues, "although many people do. They say things like, It's better for the children not to grow up with their parents in an unhappy marriage. But unless the parents are beating each other up, or abusing the children, kids are better off if their parents are together. Children are much too young to shuttle between houses. They're too young to handle the idea that the two people they love most in the world don't love each other any more, if they ever did." The essays about her mother's alcoholism and Ephron's sense of betrayal by the writer Lillian Hellman cover previously uncharted territory and are also among the most thoughtful parts of the book. Eventually, she came to feel deceived by both: Hellman for a bit too brightly over-polishing her legends and Ephron's mother for drinking herself to death at the age of 57. "For a long time before she died, I wished my mother were dead," Ephron explains. "And then she died, and it wasn't one of those things where I thought, Why did I think that? What was wrong with me? What kind of person would wish her mother dead? No, it wasn't one of those things at all. My mother had become a complete nightmare." Those are not easy words to write about the supermother who put The New Yorker's Lillian Ross in her place. (Another wonderful story included in this collection.) Apart from her penchant for repetition, my only quibble with Ephron is all this I-remember-nothing talk. How can we take it seriously from a woman who is a famous movie director, screenwriter, best-selling author, blogger and mother of two socialized, successful adult men? How can a woman who has been nominated for three Oscars complain about what an inadequate brain she has? Isn't it sort of like Meg Ryan in "You've Got Mail" looking all rumpled and sneezing into the arm of her bathrobe - but rich and powerful Tom Hanks still falls in love with her? Who falls in love with a woman with a lousy temper and a dribbling nose who lives in a walk-up apartment that in real life probably smells of cat food? How can a woman who says she remembers nothing and can't recognize her own sister get it together to direct movies and write all these books? It's seems ungenuine, like the supermodel who says she never exercises and eats three cheese-burgers a day. That's right. There's so much to love about Nora Ephron, but there's just as much to hate about her. Famous people play her in movies; she directs famous people in the movies she writes. She's happily married, as she also, only passingly (details! details!), reminds us in these books of hers. (She is married to the screenwriter Nick Pileggi, widely known to be a very nice, exceedingly accomplished person.) She looks amazingly good for an almost-septuagenarian - for anyone, any age, frankly - despite the flip of hair on the back of her head, a cowlick-turning-bald spot she refers to as "an Aruba." For all those steaks cooked in butter and extra-egg-yolk omelets and chocolate cream pies she professes to enjoy, she's got a trim figure. But you can't hate her. You love her. She's self-effacing and brilliant. I use lines of hers all the time. Just the other day, my 1-year-old and I were playing with his kitchen set and he picked up the pretend pepper and said, "Pepper." I held it over his pretend pot of stew and said, "Would you like some pepper with your paprikash?" It just came out. But it was so funny the way Billy Crystal said as much in "When Harry Met Sally" (written by Ephron, whose script earned one of those Oscar nominations). She's like Benjamin Franklin or Shakespeare: her words are now part of the fabric of the English language. Whenever we talk about "white man's overbite" - another one I use, or at least think, all the time - we're quoting her. Yes, there's some rehashing here, but that's what we expect - what we love - from Ephron. She's familiar but funny, boldly outspoken yet simultaneously reassuring. In much of her work, we get a story about betrayal, but the heroine picks up and moves on. Death of a friend or family member? Look on the bright side: there might be an inheritance somewhere, or at least a corn bread pudding recipe. (Sorry, that was the last book. In this one, it's a bread and butter pudding recipe.) LET'S face it. When most of us get divorced, Meryl Streep is not going to play us in the movie version of our lives. Because there will be no movie version of our lives. But Ephron is the poster girl for the religion of When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade. And most of us can't make lemonade - or corn bread pudding - the way she can. Let's face it. When most of us get divorced, Meryl Streep is not going to play us in the movie version of our lives. Alex Kuczynski is the author of "Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 12, 2010]

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Review by Booklist Review

The legions of readers who loved I Feel Bad about My Neck (2006) will pounce on Ephron's pithy new collection. A master of the jujitsu essay, Ephron leaves us breathless with rueful laughter. As the title suggests, she writes about the weird vagaries of memory as we age, although she is happy to report that the Senior Moment has become the Google Moment. Not that any gadget rescued her when she failed to recognize her own sister. But the truth is, Ephron remembers a lot. Take her stinging reminiscence of her entry into journalism at Newsweek in the early 1960s, when girls, no matter how well qualified, were never considered for reporter positions. An accomplished screenwriter (When Harry Met Sally . . . and Julie & Julia) in a family of screenwriters, Ephron looks further back to her Hollywood childhood and her mother's struggles with alcohol. Whether she takes on bizarre hair problems, culinary disasters, an addiction to online Scrabble, the persistent pain of a divorce, or that mean old devil, age, Ephron is candid, self-deprecating, laser-smart, and hilarious. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Now a popular blogger in addition to everything else, Ephron hit it so big with her last best-seller, a 500,000 print run is planned for her latest.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Ephron's humorous observations on aging so beloved in I Feel Bad About My Neck continue in this collection of sprightly essays on everything from her deep affection for Google to memories of her complicated relationship with the famously irascible playwright, Lillian Hellmann. Ephron's voice has a nice grain to it, but where it should skip and flow to mimic the conversational patter of her prose, it stumbles and drags. Ephron enunciates so carefully and pauses so haltingly, the audiobook sounds more like bad amateur theater rather than an acclaimed humorist reading her own material. Stripped of the author's light touch and self-deprecation, the jokes fall flat, and Ephron's quips on, say, going to the bookstore to buy a book on Alzheimer's and forgetting the name of the book, are likely to elicits more cringes than chuckles. A Knopf hardcover. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In a recent NPR interview, Ephron shared with listeners a fundamental lesson she learned from her mother about humor: "If you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you, but if you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your joke." In this follow-up to the national best seller I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006)-also available from Books on Tape/Random Audio and read by the author-Ephron takes the banana peels of life and aging and turns them into funny, relatable, and sometimes touching stories. The chapters on email and journalism are particularly amusing, while the accounts of Ephron's divorce and her mother's alcoholism show a different side to the author/director best known for her comedy. Ephron herself reads, in the manner of a best girlfriend. One doesn't have to be on the other side of 50 to appreciate her wit; recommended. [The Knopf hc, published in November 2010, was an LJ Best Seller; the Vintage pb will publish in November 2011.-Ed.]-Theresa Horn, St. Joseph Cty. P.L., South Bend, IN (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Bland, often rambling anecdotes from the acclaimed director and screenwriter.Ephron (I Feel Bad About My Neck, 2006, etc.) returns to the literary scene with a collection of essays that thematically hover around the issue of aging. "Once I went to a store to buy a book about Alzheimer's disease and forgot the name of it," she writes. The author compounds this humorous memory lapse alongside dozens of more egregious slips, leading to the conclusion, "All this makes me feel sad, and wistful, but mostly it makes me feel old." Ephron remains unapologetic throughout her waxing nostalgia, continually referring to a bygone era where people didn't use the F-word and, "I'll tell you something else: they didn't drink wine then. Nobody knew about wine." Throughout, the author engages in heavy doses of name-dropping, but she remains aloof. In many ways, Ephron's humor functions as a defense mechanism against aging, and while she pokes fun at her thinning hair and fading memory, the reader anxiously awaits an honest portrayal of the woman herself. "The D Word," a firsthand account of the difficulties of divorce, offers a rare and refreshing glimpse into the author's world, though in the final lines the reader is corralled back into familiar terrain: "for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me. And now it's not. Now the most important thing about me is that I'm old." "Journalism: A Love Story" and "Going to the Movies" offer similar heartfelt accounts of a swiftly changing world, yet Ephron's willingness to open up to the reader remains the exception, not the rule. Further, the majority of her Andy Rooneyesque musings lack profunditye.g., the opening to "The O Word," in which each sentence occupies its own paragraph: "I'm 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 that I'm old. No one actually likes to admit that they're old. The most they will cop to is that they're older. Or oldish."Only occasionally reaches emotional depthseems like a tardy attempt to capitalize on the success of I Feel Bad About My Neck.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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I Remember Nothing I have been forgetting things for years--at least since I was in my thirties. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time. I have proof. Of course, I can't remember exactly where I wrote about it, or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to. In my early days of forgetting things, words would slip away, and names. I did what you normally do when this happens: I scrolled through a mental dictionary, trying to figure out what letter the word began with, and how many syllables were involved. Eventually the lost thing would float back into my head, recaptured. I never took such lapses as harbingers of doom, or old age, or actual senescence. I always knew that whatever I'd forgotten was eventually going to come back to me sooner or later. Once I went to a store to buy a book about Alzheimer's disease and forgot the name of it. I thought it was funny. And it was, at the time. Here's a thing I've never been able to remember: the title of that movie with Jeremy Irons. The one about Claus von Bülow. You know the one. All I ever succeeded in remembering was that it was three words long, and the middle word was "of." For many years, this did not bother me at all, because no one I knew could ever think of the title either. One night, eight of us were at the theater together, and not one of us could retrieve it. Finally, at intermission, someone went out to the street and Googled it; we were all informed of the title and we all vowed to remember it forever. For all I know, the other seven did. I, on the other hand, am back to remembering that it's three words long with an "of" in the middle. By the way, when we finally learned the title that night, we all agreed it was a bad title. No wonder we didn't remember it. I am going to Google for the name of that movie. Be right back. . . . It's Reversal of Fortune . How is one to remember that title? It has nothing to do with anything. But here's the point: I have been forgetting things for years, but now I forget in a new way. I used to believe I could eventually retrieve whatever was lost and then commit it to memory. Now I know I can't possibly. Whatever's gone is hopelessly gone. And what's new doesn't stick. The other night I met a man who informed me that he had a neurological disorder and couldn't remember the faces of people he'd met. He said that sometimes he looked at himself in a mirror and had no idea whom he was looking at. I don't mean to minimize this man's ailment, which I'm sure is a bona fide syndrome with a long name that's capitalized, but all I could think was, Welcome to my world. A couple of years ago, the actor Ryan O'Neal confessed that he'd recently failed to recognize his own daughter, Tatum, at a funeral and had accidentally made a pass at her. Everyone was judgmental about this, but not me. A month earlier, I'd found myself in a mall in Las Vegas when I saw a very pleasant-looking woman coming toward me, smiling, her arms outstretched, and I thought, Who is this woman? Where do I know her from? Then she spoke and I realized it was my sister Amy. You might think, Well, how was she to know her sister would be in Las Vegas? I'm sorry to report that not only did I know, but she was the person I was meeting in the mall. All this makes me feel sad, and wistful, but mostly it makes me feel old. I have many symptoms of old age, aside from the physical. I occasionally repeat myself. I use the expression, "When I was young." Often I don't get the joke, although I pretend that I do. If I go see a play or a movie for a second time, it's as if I didn't see it at all the first time, even if the first time was just recently. I have no idea who anyone in People magazine is. I used to think my problem was that my disk was full; now I'm forced to conclude that the opposite is true: it's becoming empty. I have not yet reached the nadir of old age, the Land of Anecdote, but I'm approaching it. I know, I know, I should have kept a journal. I should have saved the love letters. I should have taken a storage room somewhere in Long Island City for all the papers I thought I'd never need to look at again. But I didn't. And sometimes I'm forced to conclude that I remember nothing. For example: I met Eleanor Roosevelt. It was June 1961, and I was on my way to a political internship at the Kennedy White House. All the Wellesley/Vassar interns drove to Hyde Park to meet the former first lady. I was dying to meet her. I'd grown up with a photograph in our den of her standing with my parents backstage at a play they'd written. My mother was wearing a corsage and Eleanor wore pearls. It was a photograph I always thought of as iconic, if I'm using the word correctly, which, if I am, it will be for the first time. We were among the thousands of Americans (mostly Jews) who had dens, and, in their dens, photos of Eleanor Roosevelt. I idolized the woman. I couldn't believe I was going to be in the same room with her. So what was she like that day in Hyde Park, you may wonder. I HAVE NO IDEA. I can't remember what she said or what she wore; I can barely summon up a mental picture of the room where we met her, although I have a very vague memory of drapes. But here's what I do remember: I got lost on the way. And ever since, every time I've been on the Taconic State Parkway, I'm reminded that I got lost there on the way to meet Eleanor Roosevelt. But I don't remember a thing about Eleanor Roosevelt herself. In 1964 the Beatles came to New York for the first time. I was a newspaper reporter and I was sent to the airport to cover their arrival. It was a Friday. I spent the weekend following them around. Sunday night they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show . You could make an argument that the sixties began that night, on The Ed Sullivan Show . It was a historic night. I was there. I stood in the back of the Ed Sullivan Theater and watched. I remember how amazingly obnoxious the fans were-the teenage girls who screamed and yelled and behaved like idiots. But how were the Beatles, you may ask. Well, you are asking the wrong person. I could barely hear them. I marched on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. This was in 1967, and it was the most significant event of the antiwar movement. Thousands and thousands of people were there. I went with a lawyer I was dating. We spent most of the day in a hotel room having sex. I am not proud of this, but I mention it because it explains why I honestly cannot remember anything about the protest, including whether I ever even got to the Pentagon. I don't think I did. I don't think I've ever been to the Pentagon. But I wouldn't bet a nickel on it one way or the other. Norman Mailer wrote an entire book about this march, called The Armies of the Night . It was 562 pages long. It won the Pulitzer Prize. And I can barely write two paragraphs about it. If you knew Norman Mailer and me and were asked to guess which of us cared more about sex, you would, of course, pick Norman Mailer. How wrong you would be. Here are some people I met that I remember nothing about: Justice Hugo Black Ethel Merman Jimmy Stewart Alger Hiss Senator Hubert Humphrey Cary Grant Benny Goodman Peter Ustinov Harry Kurnitz George Abbott Dorothy Parker I went to the Bobby Riggs-Billie Jean King tennis match and couldn't really see anything from where I was sitting. I went to stand in front of the White House the night Nixon resigned and here's what I have to tell you about it: my wallet was stolen. I went to many legendary rock concerts and spent them wondering when they would end and where we would eat afterward and whether the restaurant would still be open and what I would order. I went to at least one hundred Knicks games and I remember only the night that Reggie Miller scored eight points in the last nine seconds. I went to cover the war in Israel in l973 but my therapist absolutely forbid me to go to the front. I was not at Woodstock, but I might as well have been because I wouldn't remember it anyway. On some level, my life has been wasted on me. After all, if I can't remember it, who can? The past is slipping away and the present is a constant affront. I can't possibly keep up. When I was younger, I managed to overcome my resistance to new things. After a short period of negativity, I flung myself at the Cuisinart food processor. I was curious about technology. I became a champion of e-mail and blogs--I found them romantic; I even made movies about them. But now I believe that almost anything new has been put on the earth in order to make me feel bad about my dwindling memory, and I've erected a wall to protect myself from most of it. On the other side of that wall are many things, pinging. For the most part I pay no attention. For a long time, I didn't know the difference between the Sunnis and the Shias, but there were so many pings I was finally forced to learn. But I can't help wondering, Why did I bother? Wasn't it enough to know they didn't like each other? And in any case, I have now forgotten. At this moment, some of the things I'm refusing to know anything about include: The former Soviet republics The Kardashians Twitter All Housewives, Survivors, American Idols, and Bachelors Karzai's brother Soccer Monkfish Jay-Z Every drink invented since the Cosmopolitan Especially the drink made with crushed mint leaves. You know the one. I am going to Google the name of that drink. Be right back. . . . The Mojito. I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. 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? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up. You can delude yourself that no one at the table thinks of you as a geezer. And finding the missing bit is so quick. 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. You can't retrieve your life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it). But you can retrieve the name of that actor who was in that movie, the one about World War II. And the name of that writer who wrote that book, the one about her affair with that painter. Or the name of that song that was sung by that singer, the one about love. You know the one. From the Trade Paperback edition. Excerpted from I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections by Nora Ephron All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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