Good and Cheap (Books)! Day 18

I was on the phone with my mother a couple of weeks ago and we were both complaining about how bad our memory was. It got pretty competitive pretty quickly as we each tried to out not remember each other. Anyway it got me thinking about Nora Ephron’s I Remember Nothing so I picked it up off the shelf yesterday and read the entire thing.  She has a great line in the title essay that goes, “The Senior Moment has become the Google Moment.”  Absolutely true.

Ephron is able to do what only a few essayists can do successfully. She walks the line of funny and heartbreak flawlessly.  I have a new appreciation for the essay “Pentimento,” about when Ephron met and befriended Lillian Hellman.  I didn’t think too much about it when I originally read the book a few years ago, but it is really lovely. It's all at once funny, really sad, and absolutely insightful. The same can be said for her essay about divorce called “The D Word.” My favorite essay is “The O Word,” which now after her death is really telling and absolutely beautiful.

And if you love lists--I personally have a love hate relationship with lists but at the end of the day I can’t not read a list if it's put in front of my face. She’s got a few fantastic lists in here, including Twenty-Five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again” (Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one), “What I Won’t Miss” (Polls that show that 32 percent of the American people believe in creationism), and “What I will Miss” (Dinner with friends in cities where none of us lives).

You know who should read Nora Ephron? Everyone who likes David Sedaris, Tina Fey, or David Rakoff. Actually, everyone. Everyone should read Nora Ephron.