I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections

From the Publisher

Nora Ephron returns with her first book since the astounding success of I Feel Bad About My Neck, taking a cool, hard, hilarious look at the past, the present, and the future, bemoaning the vicissitudes of modern life, and recalling with her signature clarity and wisdom everything she hasn’t (yet) forgotten.

Ephron writes about falling hard for a way of life (“Journalism: A Love Story”) and about breaking up even harder with the men in her life (“The D Word”); lists “Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again” (“There is no explaining the stock market but people try”; “You can never know the truth of anyone’s marriage, including your own”; “Cary Grant was Jewish”; “Men cheat”); reveals the alarming evolution, a decade after she wrote and directed You’ve Got Mail, of her relationship with her in-box (“The Six Stages of E-Mail”); and asks the age-old question, which came first, the chicken soup or the cold? All the while, she gives candid, edgy voice to everything women who have reached a certain age have been thinking . . . but rarely acknowledging.

Filled with insights and observations that instantly ring true—and could have come only from Nora Ephron—I Remember Nothing is pure joy.

From the Hardcover edition.

Features -

I Remember Nothing

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

I Remember Nothing 3

Who Are You 13

Journalism: A Love Story 17

The Legend 35

My Aruba 48

My Life as an Heiress 51

Going to the Movies 62

Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again 68

I Just Want to Say: The Egg-White Omelette 70

I Just Want to Say: Teflon 73

I Just Want to Say: No, I Do Not Want Another Bottle of Pellegrino 77

I Just Want to Say: The World Is Not Flat 81

I Just Want to Say: Chicken Soup 87

Pentimento 88

My Life as a Meat Loaf 99

Addicted to L-U-V 106

The Six Stages of E-Mail 111

Flops 115

Christinas Dinner 122

The D Word 130

The O Word 138

What I Won't Miss 143

What I Will Miss 145

Acknowledgments 147

Biography

Nora Ephron is also the author of Wallflower at the Orgy. She received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay for When Harry Met Sally..., Silkwood, and Sleepless in Seattle, which she also directed. Her other credits include the film Michael and the play Imaginary Friends. She lives in New York City with her husband, writer Nicholas Pileggi.

Editorial Reviews -

I Remember Nothing

From the Publisher

Nora Ephron returns with her first book since the astounding success of I Feel Bad About My Neck, taking a cool, hard, hilarious look at the past, the present, and the future, bemoaning the vicissitudes of modern life, and recalling with her signature clarity and wisdom everything she hasn’t (yet) forgotten.

Ephron writes about falling hard for a way of life (“Journalism: A Love Story”) and about breaking up even harder with the men in her life (“The D Word”); lists “Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again” (“There is no explaining the stock market but people try”; “You can never know the truth of anyone’s marriage, including your own”; “Cary Grant was Jewish”; “Men cheat”); reveals the alarming evolution, a decade after she wrote and directed You’ve Got Mail, of her relationship with her in-box (“The Six Stages of E-Mail”); and asks the age-old question, which came first, the chicken soup or the cold? All the while, she gives candid, edgy voice to everything women who have reached a certain age have been thinking . . . but rarely acknowledging.

Filled with insights and observations that instantly ring true—and could have come only from Nora Ephron—I Remember Nothing is pure joy.

From the Hardcover edition.

The Washington Post - Carolyn See

What you can finally say about Ephron is that she's a tremendously talented woman from a significant American period. Yes, she has some trouble making up her mind. She'll come horrifyingly close to self-denigration (in the divorce essay, for example), but then, just in case you might go along with that gag, she'll dazzle you in the next pages with strings of perfect prose. Luck, hard work, privilege, yes, yes, yes. But tremendous talent is her forte, her strong suit, her fiendish trump card.

The New York Times - Alex Kuczynski

Nora Ephron's new book of essays is titled I Remember Nothing, but that's a sop. She remembers everything, and while some of the material in this book is tantalizingly fresh and forthright, some of it we've seen before. Which doesn't mean it's not just as entertaining the second or even third time around, offered in each new iteration with a few more spicy details…[Ephron]'s familiar but funny, boldly outspoken yet simultaneously reassuring.

Publishers Weekly

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. (Dec.)

Kirkus Reviews

Bland, often rambling anecdotes from the acclaimed director and screenwriter.

Ephron (I Feel Bad About My Neck, 2006, etc.) returns to the literary scene with a collection of essays that thematically hover around the issue of aging. "Once I went to a store to buy a book about Alzheimer's disease and forgot the name of it," she writes. The author compounds this humorous memory lapse alongside dozens of more egregious slips, leading to the conclusion, "All this makes me feel sad, and wistful, but mostly it makes me feel old." Ephron remains unapologetic throughout her waxing nostalgia, continually referring to a bygone era where people didn't use the F-word and, "I'll tell you something else: they didn't drink wine then. Nobody knew about wine." Throughout, the author engages in heavy doses of name-dropping, but she remains aloof. In many ways, Ephron's humor functions as a defense mechanism against aging, and while she pokes fun at her thinning hair and fading memory, the reader anxiously awaits an honest portrayal of the woman herself. "The D Word," a firsthand account of the difficulties of divorce, offers a rare and refreshing glimpse into the author's world, though in the final lines the reader is corralled back into familiar terrain: "for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me. And now it's not. Now the most important thing about me is that I'm old." "Journalism: A Love Story" and "Going to the Movies" offer similar heartfelt accounts of a swiftly changing world, yet Ephron's willingness to open up to the reader remains the exception, not the rule. Further, the majority of her Andy Rooney–esque musings lack profundity—e.g., the opening to "The O Word," in which each sentence occupies its own paragraph: "I'm old. I am sixty-nine years old. I'm not really old, of course. Really old is eighty. But if you are young, you would definitely think that I'm old. No one actually likes to admit that they're old. The most they will cop to is that they're older. Or oldish."

Only occasionally reaches emotional depth—seems like a tardy attempt to capitalize on the success of I Feel Bad About My Neck.

Loading...

Features -

I Remember Nothing

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

I Remember Nothing 3

Who Are You 13

Journalism: A Love Story 17

The Legend 35

My Aruba 48

My Life as an Heiress 51

Going to the Movies 62

Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again 68

I Just Want to Say: The Egg-White Omelette 70

I Just Want to Say: Teflon 73

I Just Want to Say: No, I Do Not Want Another Bottle of Pellegrino 77

I Just Want to Say: The World Is Not Flat 81

I Just Want to Say: Chicken Soup 87

Pentimento 88

My Life as a Meat Loaf 99

Addicted to L-U-V 106

The Six Stages of E-Mail 111

Flops 115

Christinas Dinner 122

The D Word 130

The O Word 138

What I Won't Miss 143

What I Will Miss 145

Acknowledgments 147

Synopsis

Nora Ephron returns with her first book since the astounding success of I Feel Bad About My Neck, taking a cool, hard, hilarious look at the past, the present, and the future, bemoaning the vicissitudes of modern life, and recalling with her signature clarity and wisdom everything she hasn’t (yet) forgotten.Ephron writes about falling hard for a way of life (“Journalism: A Love Story”) and about breaking up even harder with the men in her life (“The D Word”); lists “Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again” (“There is no explaining the stock market but people try”; “You can never know the truth of anyone’s marriage, including your own”; “Cary Grant was Jewish”; “Men cheat”); reveals the alarming evolution, a decade after she wrote and directed You’ve Got Mail, of her relationship with her in-box (“The Six Stages of E-Mail”); and asks the age-old question, which came first, the chicken soup or the cold? All the while, she gives candid, edgy voice to everything women who have reached a certain age have been thinking . . . but rarely acknowledging.Filled with insights and observations that instantly ring true—and could have come only from Nora Ephron—I Remember Nothing is pure joy.