It all started when I was examining my skin in the mirror one night, as women of a certain age are wont to do, and I noticed the crepe-paper-like texture of my neck.
By dint of DNA (thank you, Nannie), I tend to look younger than I am. I do not mean to brag, but it is true that people generally peg me anywhere from five to ten years younger than my actual age.
I don’t really dwell on it because, to me, most working adults, at a glance, could be anywhere from 30 to 55. It’s only when you talk to them and learn their cultural touchstones that you figure out where they stand in the generational landscape. Do they make references to Van Halen and Diff’rent Strokes? Or is it Nirvana and My So Called Life? Or, God help us, The Backstreet Boys and Felicity? What you talkin’ about, Willis?
Anyway, so everyone “of a certain age” pretty much looks the same to me . . . except, I have recently discovered to my chagrin, the necks.
Necks don’t lie. With all the bending and stretching, especially in our smartphone age in which we are all looking down all the time, they cannot lie. They tell people you’ve been looking down and around for a long time.
And mine is a brutally honest neck. My neck, an over-50-year-old neck, tells you it has very much been looking down and around for more than a half-century, thank you very much.
So when I was examining my neck the other night before bed, contemplating buying neck cream (which I did do, but have not yet opened because I have a generally slovenly skin care regime — more on that later, in a to-be-written essay) . . . . When I was looking at my crepey neck, I remembered a book by Nora Ephron called I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.
I remember when it came out in 2006 and, I confess, I didn’t really get it. The When-Harry- Met-Sally-Silkwood-Sleepless-in-Seattle lady wrote a book about her neck. Weird. I didn’t read it.
I didn’t read it because my neck and I were only 35 years old at the time and, while not quite swan-like, my neck certainly was no turkey-waddle either. It was an early-middle-aged neck, and it and I were unconcerned with fine wrinkles and horizontal creases at that moment in our history.
Flash forward 17 years and here we were, contemplating neck cream. I finally understood the title of that book.
So I bought it on Audible. And I started listening. Not only did I relate to Nora Ephron’s essay about her feeling bad about her neck. I related to a great many of her essays on what it’s like to be an aging woman.
I related so much to her essays that I started telling my slightly more middle-aged husband about Nora Ephron’s essays and how funny and relatable they are. I even related to the essay in which she talks about not being able to read maps and phone books anymore — even though we do not have maps and phone books anymore — because I related to needing readers. (And . . . the essay made me nostalgic for maps and phone books. Remember Mapsco?)
So anyway, one hot Texas summer afternoon, after I’d shared with my husband Nora’s love for John LeCarre (whom we both also love), he sent me a text, a writing prompt of sorts. It went like this:
Meredyth writes the next Ephron memoir:
"After 15 years of marriage, there seems no point to renewing any vows. Marriage vows have always seemed to me unnecessarily prolix and frankly unnecessarily vague. The terms of our marriage, I tell my husband, reduce to one fundamental rule: Our lives must never be so penurious that we’re forced to buy store-brand salad dressing. We must be sufficiently comfortable that I can guiltlessly buy Newman’s Own."
I sent this true gem to my two best work friends with this comment:
I feel like, perhaps, no actual memoir is needed, for he has perfectly summarized my views on our future retirement. I do not ask for much. Only that we are wealthy enough to afford non-store brand salad dressing in our dotage.
Then I added, “Perhaps, though, a memoir would be appropriate, after all, to explain how I arrived at this modest life goal. Hmmm.”
And then I dismissed that idea as nonsense. Who would read my essays? I did not marry Carl Bernstein, nor have I written many famous movies and books. I mean, I would like to do that. I would love to write novels. I would love to write engaging novels that people can’t put down. And I’ve tried. I get writers block. But I find my own stories trite, tired, derivative. I bore myself. The characters are wooden. I grow to hate them and do not want to spend any more time with them, let alone create them and their stupid lives. You get the idea: While I may have that one great novel in me, as the old saw goes, I am not sure that I have the capacity to get it out of me.
And yet, I write essays. I write them nearly effortlessly. The words just come. I’m just talking to you, see?, telling you my opinions, my prejudices, my observations and frustrations. I’ve been doing it for years in a blog only a handful of people read. But the handful seem to enjoy my essays. So why not a memoir in essay form? Maybe more than a handful would read it. Maybe? Worth a shot?
Hmmm.
