You know the drill:  A stylish women friend is celebrating a milestone birthday and you’ve been invited to celebrate, but under the sternly issued condition that there be “No Gifts, Please!”.

It goes without saying that this gift-averse Birthday Girl’s age is probably closer to the mid-century mark than, say, the quarter-century mark, since we don’t know many Sweet Sixteens, Twenty-Ones, or even Thirty-somethings who don’t love presents of any kind, no matter how many times they may say otherwise.

But if you subscribe to the old adage that we spend the first forty years of our lives accumulating Stuff and the next forty trying to get rid of it, it follows that, the more candles there are going to be on the cake, the more likely it is that when she says “just bring yourself” , she really means it.



Still...you want to bring something besides your old self and a snarky card.

(Although those certainly have their place, especially when “you care enough to hit ‘send’ ” ).

In that case, we suggest you pick up a few copies of I Feel Bad About My Neck And Other Thoughts on Being A Woman by Nora Ephron to keep on hand for just such an occasion.

Women who are approaching a Certain Age will certainly identify with Ephron’s neck fixation ("The neck is a dead giveaway… You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to do that if it had a neck...” ) or her laments about how things have changed, like how there’s no longer such a thing as just ‘shampoo’ or ‘skin cream’ anymore.
But not everything is about getting older; things like “I Hate My Purse” and how it’s virtually impossible to recreate your hair stylist’s blowout at home-- no matter how much money you spend on the same equipment and products--have afflicted us all at one point or another.

And not all of the essays are funny or lighthearted, either.  After all, this is the woman who wrote Heartburn and Silkwood, and whose romantic comedies, like Sleepless In Seattle and When Harry Met Sally are always infused with an undercurrent of pathos no matter how happy the endings are.

But that’s another reason why we love this book--Ephron’s not afraid to say that, despite all the cheery bromides and cliches about aging gracefully,  a lot of things about getting old just, well-- pardon our French but there’s only one way to put it--kind of suck.  And for some reason, we find this much more comforting than the desperately perky cadre of celebrities and authors who refuse to admit there’s a downside.

Either way, we think it makes a great little not-a-birthday-present, since it’s a slim enough volume and a quick enough read for you to be able to fend off any protests that you violated the No Gift request.  ("It’s not a gift, Darling”, you can say,"it’s more like a really fat Hallmark card")

Of course, not everyone likes to get books no matter how innocuous they are;

in which case there’s always the audio version read by the author, who, incidentally sounds a lot like Joan Cusack, whom we also adore, but that’s another story…