Three Stars

When I lived in New York, I used to watch Sleepless in Seattle all the time. That and When Harry Met Sally. Now that I’m back in Seattle, when I’m missing New York, I watch When Harry Met Sally, or You’ve Got Mail. No, I don’t have an obsession with Meg Ryan; I have a love of fun, sweet movies that feature two of my favorite cities and have interesting female leads. But there is a common thread across these movies, and that is that they were written by Nora Ephron.

I recently realized that I was spending too much on a monthly Audible.com membership and went to cancel. I was about to lose nine credits (NINE), so I did a quick scan of books and downloaded nine audio books, including two by Ms. Ephron. I figured her work would be interesting, fun, a little on the sweet side, but ultimately satisfying. I was mostly right.

The audio version is a pretty quick one – I got through it on a couple of runs and a few walks to and from work. It wasn’t laugh out loud funny, but it was insightful and amusing. The book is a collection of essays on being a woman. Specifically, the essays are her reflection on being an older woman. She tells stories from when she was younger, but most of those stories come back to how it relates to her thoughts now. She wrote it when she was 64, which is near my own mother’s age, so I also think I was hoping for a little insight into what my mother may be experiencing as she’s gotten older, which I feel like I got.

The stories aren’t mind-blowing, and Ms. Ephron’s reading of it is very slow (she pronounces every word very deliberately), but I’ve always enjoyed hearing these books read by the person who experienced the stories. I feel like it adds something to the experience. In the essay on death, it added a somewhat disturbing note, as Ms. Ephron died in 2012. She seems like she was an interesting person, a lovely friend, and clearly a talented writer. If you’re looking for an interesting read that sometimes goes a little deeper (though not always – there is an entire chapter devoted to her hatred of purses), I’d recommend this.