I feel bad about my neck, too

I inherited the neck of my father's side of our family. Thick. Connects directly from chin to throat. I've always thought it was one of my worst features. If you think that's vain, I'm here to tell you that all women know exactly which body features they hate. Just ask anyone. She will tell you, with scary precision, what she believes is horribly wrong with her nose, or her thighs, or her eyebrows, or her ears.... It is a sickness we all carry.

So when I saw Nora Ephron's book, I Feel Bad About My Neck and other thoughts on being a woman, I about shrieked with delight. A whole book about fat, bad necks.

As it turns out, the book is about much more than necks; it's about aging, and it's the best thing I've read on the topic yet. An excerpt:

"Every so often I read a book about age, whoever's writing it says it's great to be old. It's great to be wise and sage and mellow; it's great to be at the point where you understand just what matters in life. I can't stand people who say things like this. What can they be thinking? Don't they have necks?"

How can you not just love her for speaking THAT TRUTH?

Her neck deal has to do with the fact that necks start going in our early 40s and there is really no fixing them. Some women choose to do all kinds of things with their faces to slow down the inevitable advance of disintegration, but, as Ephron says, "necks don't lie."

We've all seen women -- mostly Hollywood types and rich people -- who tighten their faces up to the point of silliness, and look even more ridiculous because under that over-lifted face is an over-droopy neck.

My neck is indeed getting worse with age. It's thicker, jowly, and careening towards a gigantic double chin. I actually think about how to minimize my neck-ness when someone is taking a photo of me. And I avoid turtlenecks since my neck kind of flows over the top of them. Not cute.

Yes, this is silly. Yes, this is vanity. We all say gamely that we don't really care, "considering the alternative," but we do care.

For me, it's mostly about coming to grips with leaving the "older side of young" and moving into the "younger side of old." It's a new, surprisingly scary place, where you come home from work too tired to do anything but watch TV, have the short-term memory of a pea (a friend calls it "CRS" or "can't remember shit"), aches and pains, yaddy yaddy yada... It's a time when movie stars your age who once were the hotties have jowls and saggy necks, and now show up in minor, non-hottie, sporadic roles on TV. It depresses me. I am 52, a phase of aging where Ephron says we go through "age shame." I think she's right.

In your forties you are still on the old side of young. You still look juicy. The fifties are when you come to grips with the fact that you are no longer one of them. That you realize, as Ephron says, "now" is "their time," and not "our time" anymore. You might know who Alicia Keys is, for example, and love her music, but she is not of you, she is of them.

And Ephron says this about the sixties:

"When you cross into your sixties, your odds of dying -- or of merely getting horribly sick on the way to dying -- spike. Death is a sniper: It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know, it's everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again you could be."

I feel that coming and I'll be honest -- it terrifies me. So we focus on hating our necks (or what ever aging body part we hate) because it's easier than being terrified. We hate our necks because they symbolize the slow march to the end of our days. We hate our necks because they remind us it is not our time anymore.

Maybe more of us need to take off our game face, be more honest, and fess up that aging really sucks, no matter how great our lives are, no matter how happy we are to be alive.

So I'll just say it: I really do feel bad about my neck and I am so not ready to be sliding into old.

~~~~~

P.S. Nice collection of reviews of Ephron's book here. I hope you'll read the book, whatever your age.