Watermark Books and Cafe

"I Remember Nothing" and Other Reflections by Nora Ephron (Knopf, ISBN 9780307595607, $22.95)   

If my memory serves me correctly... this collection of essays is hilarious and poignant all at the same time. One of the alarming characteristics of getting older—and one that can’t really be understood by anyone younger—is the frustrating inability to remember things: your neighbor’s last name, the show you watched on TV last night, that really great restaurant you’d like to recommend... and the list goes on and on. My belief is that if you don’t approach these neurological lapses with humor and learn just to embrace them for what they are, you’ll only end up bitter and frustrated... and still won’t be able to remember anything anyway!    

Ephron’s latest book (her first since the wildly successful "I Feel Bad about My Neck") provides a humorous antidote to age-related memory loss and the other travails of life for those of us “of a certain age.”  From the very first paragraph, you’ll identify with Ephron. I was astonished to learn that she uses what I thought was invented by my Dad, that mental dictionary trick—and one I’ve totally adopted—of scrolling through the alphabet and trying to figure out what letter the word or name you’ve forgotten begins with. But it doesn’t seem to help Ephron any more than it does me. Instead, she acknowledges that we are lucky to be living in the “Google years” when “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?”  But, alas, “you can’t retrieve your life.”   

Ephron’s description of seeing a smiling woman, arms outstretched, coming toward her in a mall but not realizing who she was until the woman spoke (her own sister!) and then confessing that she was the very person Ephron was supposed to be meeting that day didn’t horrify me in the least. Oh, no, it only bolstered my spirits, validating my own inability to recognize pretty much anyone I encounter who pops up out of their usual context. (Please don’t judge me, kind reader.  Just identify yourself when I see you, for Heaven’s sake!) 

Besides documenting her increasingly poor memory, Ephron also writes of the pervasive presence of technology in our lives in “The Six Stages of E-Mail,” a decade after writing and directing "You’ve Got Mail" and "Sleepless in Seattle," the movies that made online romance acceptable instead of creepy. She also documents the beginning of her writing career in “Journalism:  A Love Story.” Describing her first experiences in the smoky newsrooms of the 1960’s where she worked as a mail girl since “women didn’t become writers at Newsweek,” Ephron brilliantly skewers the sexism of the Mad Men era: “For every man, an inferior woman. For every male writer, a female drone.” Yet she was able—through her wit and talent—to rise to the top in the journalism world. 

Ephron’s insights and observations about aging and her clear-eyed ability to look back at her life without sentimentalizing it are what make this latest book a delight to read. Or at least that’s how I remember it! 

Review by Shirley Wells