I Remember Nothing

It's not easy to reveal everything about your life--especially if you can't remember it all. But Nora Ephron cleanses her soul and reveals all she can recall, applying her personal brand of humor. Fond memories include growing up in a Beverly Hills family in the "biz" and working in the trenches of journalism in New York City. She also recounts the heartbreak of watching her mother drink away her life. Ephron--whose most-well-known work is the movie WHEN HARRY MET SALLY--is a natural storyteller--intelligent yet approachable, lighthearted yet experienced with life's difficulties, such as divorce, an aging and distant father, and competing in a male-dominated field. But Ephron is a clever survivor, and the listener is the benefactor of her honesty as she unselfishly shares her achievements, joys, and sorrows. But I find myself yearning to know about the parts she's forgotten. B.J.P. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

February 28, 2011
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.