I've always been a Nora Ephron fan. Nobody is funnier at capturing the anxieties of the aging boomer generation. I won't forget to pick up a copy of her new book. It's called I Remember Nothing. Ha, ha.
Nora Ephron is 69. I am not - yet. I read her books with gruesome fascination because they are a message from the front lines of my near-term future. Everything that has happened to her will soon happen to me, if it hasn't already.
The subject of her book is not short-term memory loss, with which my friends and I are annoyingly familiar. That's what happens when you set out to do four errands and can only remember three, and one of them is to go to the bookstore to buy a certain book, but by the time you get there (if you ever do) you have to call your husband to remind you what it is (if you've brought your cellphone and remembered to charge it).
The type of forgetfulness chronicled here is far more alarming. It describes the way that years - indeed, decades - of one's life can vanish down the memory hole, like a Polaroid snapshot (I know I'm dating myself here) that fades away to nothing. So what if you can't remember what you had for lunch? What's bad is when you can't remember what happened in your 40s.
Ms. Ephron's confession comes as a relief, because I'm like that too. I'm lucky that no one will ever be interested in my memoirs. I am rather sure that in my 40s, I moved three times, changed jobs twice, got married and went to Bali. But please don't press me for the details. I don't remember the contents of the books I read, the articles I edited or the columns I wrote. They are nearly as unfamiliar to me as the A-plus-plus honours thesis that was the summit of my life in academe. The last time I picked it up, I couldn't understand a word. Even major episodes of my youthful romantic life have become tragically blurred. Recently, I ran into an elderly man at a party. He looked vaguely familiar. I wondered if I'd ever gone out with him. If so, did we …? I didn't dare to ask if he was wondering the same thing about me.
"Don't you remember when you fired Conrad Black as a columnist?" someone asked me the other day. Sadly, no.
I like to think I come by these lapses honestly. My dad, who had two daughters with one wife and two daughters with another, never could keep us all straight. The wives confused him too. Once, when he showed up for a family wedding, he introduced himself to my mom. "Hi, I'm Bill," he said jovially.
But now I see that memory, like other organs, atrophies with age. "Go ahead, ask me what Eleanor Roosevelt was like," says Ms. Ephron, who met and interviewed the great woman. Alas, she has no idea. She is rueful that her life, which has been full of interesting people, exciting work, and fascinating events, has been entirely wasted on her. This is a familiar Ephron theme. In her last book, I Feel Bad About My Neck, she rued that youth and beauty had also been wasted on her. Now that she was middle-aged, she wrote, she had an almost irresistible urge to stop all the 25-year-old women she saw and say, "Why are you so anxious and insecure? You're beautiful! All 25-year-olds are beautiful!"
I feel that way about my own 25-year-old self. I want to get into a time machine and give her a good smack. "Cheer up, you moron," I would say. "You have no idea."
When you're young, it's impossible to envisage your own future - for better or for worse. You can't imagine that you'll one day feel secure, settle down in a happy marriage and find your place in the world. Nor can you imagine that you will one day resemble your middle-aged mother. For years, you look pityingly at older women and think to yourself, "I will never get turkey neck." Then you realize that some of your slightly older friends are getting turkey neck. "I feel sorry for them," you think. One day, you look into the mirror and see that you, too, are getting turkey neck. You are now faced with a decision: Have plastic surgery or get a dimmer switch.
The other day, I went shopping with a much older woman I know. She has always been elegant and well-dressed. Lately she's been ill, a little shaky on her feet, and hasn't been able to get out. Our first stop was lingerie. "I need bras," she told the 20-something sales clerk, without a hint of self-pity. "My breasts are hanging down to my waist, and I need something that will prop them up."
Suddenly, I stopped feeling so depressed about my turkey neck. "Cheer up, you moron," I told myself. "You have no idea." It struck me that that every day I am alive will soon be the good old days, so I might as well enjoy them now. As for the funny woman who wrote that book I'm going to get - you know the one I mean - I'm sure she would agree.