I Remember Nothing

February 28, 2011
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.

October 4, 2010
Reading these succinct, razor-sharp essays by veteran humorist (I Feel Bad About My Neck), novelist, and screenwriter-director Ephron is to be reminded that she cut her teeth as a New York Post writer in the 1960s, as she recounts in the most substantial selection here, "Journalism: A Love Story." Forthright, frequently wickedly backhanded, these essays cover the gamut of later-life observations (she is 69), from the dourly hilarious title essay about losing her memory, which asserts that her ubiquitous senior moment has now become the requisite Google moment, to several flimsy lists, such as "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again," e.g., "Movies have no political effect whatsoever." Shorts such as the several "I Just Want to Say" pieces feature Ephron's trademark prickly contrariness and are stylistically digestible for the tabloids. Other essays delve into memories of fascinating people she knew, such as the Lillian Hellman of Pentimento, whom she adored until the older woman's egomania rubbed her the wrong way. Most winning, however, are her priceless reflections on her early life, such as growing up in Beverly Hills with her movie-people parents, and how being divorced shaped the bulk of her life, in "The D Word." There's an elegiac quality to many of these pieces, handled with wit and tenderness.