I Feel Bad About My Neck...

Sometimes it's just fun to be a bookseller. Great writers edify, but they also must entertain. Nothing is more fun than to be able to offer up a book like Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.

Over the holidays, a select group of readers swarmed to this book. It was a common gift among a certain segment. Women were giving it to a friend or sister. Men were giving it to their wives. And the book continues to have legs.

That's understandable if you've read Nora Ephron. Her more famous book is the thinly veiled Heartburn, a fictional retelling of her marriage to and divorce from Carl Bernstein. She's a frequent contributor to literate magazines (I recently read a piece by her about falling in love with an apartment; she lived in a fabulous rent-controlled New York apartment for about 20 years. When it went condo, she thought she couldn't give it up, but learned that you can walk away from an apartment you thought you loved - well, it was funnier and more poignant when she wrote it!). She's a blogger at The Huffington Post. But you know her best as a screenwriter (Sleepless in Seattle; When Harry Met Sally; You've Got Mail!).

Here's a snippet from Neck, from the chapter titled "The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words"

My sister Delia says this, and it's true. When we were growing up, we used to love to hear the story of how our parents met and fell in love and eloped one summer when they were both camp counselors. It was so much a part of our lives, a song sung again and again, and no matter what happened, no matter how awful things became between the two of them, we always knew that our parents had once been madly in love.

But in a divorce, you never tell your children that you were once madly in love with their father because it would be too confusing.

And then, after a while, you can't even remember whether you were.

Isn't that great?

The book in my hand is the twenty-second printing! The dust jacket touts "Nationwide Best Seller." We've sold 18 copies since August, and let me tell you, that's not chicken feed for this store. I think you'll love it. It's not new in the sense that we just got it. But it's one of those gems that's going to have a long shelf-life. It's slim (perfect for a trip) and not too expensive ($19.95), and maybe now it's time for the guys to appreciate good, funny writing, too.




And, oh yeah, if you want to wait for it to come out in paperback, you'll only have to wait until April...2008. Here's the Random House browse widget. Come into the store and browse it, too...in our humor section.

I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron
ISBN 9780307264558, Aug. 2006 (Knopf) $19.95 (Hardcover)

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