Having picked this book to read more about the topic of aging, how women deal with it and how they experience it, I can’t say that I ended up being a fan of it… It started with an intro by Dolly Alderton that went on and on without adding any value and it went over into so many parts of the book sounding privileged, anti-feminist and non-forward thinking. It was first published in 2006 and to me, it felt like it aged really badly. Being bound to diet culture as a woman, forcing oneself through countless beauty treatments to correspond to the female image that society expects, dressing in a way to hide certain parts of one’s body, needing to wear make-up to look presentable or encouraging plastic surgery – these topics are luckily being questioned in 2023 and the only people I see still being bound to them are my mother and her friends of the same age.

There are a couple of old boyfriends whom I always worry about bumping into […], I still think about them every time I’m tempted to leave the house without eyeliner.

p. 46

Every so often a rich friend asks me if I’d like to go on a trip involving a boat, and all I can think about is the misery of five days in a small cabin struggling with a blow-dryer. And I am never going back to Africa; the last time I was there, in 1972, there were no hairdressers out in the bush, and as far as I was concerned, that was the end of that place.

p. 48

The fact that the author classifies her friends into “rich” and “not rich” categories as in the quote above or the fact that she called an entire continent “that place”, as if she has visited all the different countries in Africa simply sounded racist. This might be her sense of humour but it simply crossed a line of being acceptable for me. The only thing that stopped me from giving the lowest rating to the book was how it got better towards the end and because I was able to relate to very few, but at least some passages within it.

Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. […] Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

p. 74

I live in an apartment. I could never live anywhere but in an apartment. I love apartments because I lose everything. Apartments are horizontal, so it’s much easier to find the things I lose – such as my glasses, gloves, wallet, lipstick, book, magazine, cell phone, and credit card.

p. 135-136

After watching the documentary “Everything is Copy” about the author that her son has directed after her death made me understand the whole fascination around her a bit better. Her writing seems to have stood out more in her screenplays but even within the essays here, her particular style, which is extremely simplistic, was tangible. Some of the highlights ended up being a bit of outspoken commentary on aging and in the end I understood that the audience these essays were written for back in the days surely identified with the author’s thoughts.

But the honest truth is that it’s sad to be over sixty. The long shadows are everywhere – friends dying and battling illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones.

p. 188

When you cross into your sixties, your odds of dying – spike. Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know, it’s everywhere.

p. 192

All in all, I left the reading experience without having learned anything new. There were some parts that I found cute or funny but mostly I wouldn’t have needed to have this book in my life. If you have seen the title popping up here and there, wondering if you should read it at some point, just let it be and rather watch some of Nora Ephron’s famous movies like “When Harry Met Sally….” or “Julie and Julia”.

★★☆☆☆ (2/5)

_{Edition: ISBN 978-0-8575-2693-9
Transworld, 2020 (first published in French in 2006)}