by Nora Ephron
Now I’m not going to tell you that (like Proust tasting the madeleine) I shuddered; nor am I going to report that “the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory.” That would take way more than cabbage strudel. But Andre’s cabbage strudel was divine—crisp but moist, savory but sweet, buttery beyond imagining. It wasn’t completely identical to Mrs. Herbst’s, but it was absolutely as delicious, if not more so. Tasting it again was like being able to turn back the clock, like having the consequences of a mistake erased; it was better than getting a blouse back that the dry cleaners had lost, or a cell phone returned that had been left in a taxi; it was a validation of never-giving-up and of hope-springing-eternal; it was many things, it was all things, it was nothing at all; but mostly, it was cabbage strudel.
On Rapture
I’ve just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture—with a book. I loved this book. I loved every second of it. I was transported into its world. I was reminded of all sorts of things in my own life. I was in anguish over the fate of its characters. I felt alive, and engaged, and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I’ve loved. I composed a dozen imaginary letters to the author, letters I’ll never write, much less send. I wrote letters of praise. I wrote letters relating entirely inappropriate personal information about my own experiences with the author’s subject matter. I even wrote a letter of recrimination when one of the characters died and I was grief-stricken. But mostly I wrote letters of gratitude: the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read, but it doesn’t happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I’m truly beside myself.
When I was a child, nearly every book I read sent me into rapture. Can I be romanticizing my early reading experiences? I don’t think so. I can tick off so many books that I read and re-read when I was growing up—foremost among them the Oz books, which obsessed me—but so many others that were favorites in the most compelling way. I wanted so badly to be Jane Banks, growing up in London with Mary Poppins for a nanny, or Homer Price, growing up in Centerburg with an uncle who owned a donut machine that wouldn’t stop making donuts. Little Sara Crewe in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic A Little Princess was my alter ego—not in any real way, you understand; she was a much better-behaved child than I ever was—but I was so entranced by the story of the little rich girl who was sent up to the garret to be the scullery maid at the fancy boarding school where she’d been a pampered student before her father died. Oh, how I wanted to be an orphan! I read The Nun’s Story, and oh, how I wanted to be a nun! I wanted to be shipwrecked on a desert island and stranded in Krakatoa! I wanted to be Ozma, and Jo March, and Anne Frank, and Nancy Drew, and Eloise, and Anne of Green Gables—and in my imagination, at least, I could be.
I did most of my reading as a child on my bed or on a rattan sofa in the sunroom of the house I grew up in. Here’s a strange thing: Whenever I read a book I love, I start to remember all the other books that have sent me into rapture, and I can remember where I was living and the couch I was sitting on when I read them. After college, living in Greenwich Village, I sat on my brand-new wide-wale corduroy couch and read The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, the extraordinary novel that changed my life and the lives of so many other young women in the 1960s. I have the paperback copy I read at the time, and it’s dog-eared, epiphany after epiphany marked so that I could easily refer back to them. Does anyone read The Golden Notebook nowadays? I don’t know, but at the time, just before the second stage of the women’s movement burst into being, I was electrified by Lessing’s heroine, Anna, and her struggle to become a free woman. Work, friendship, love, sex, politics, psychoanalysis, writing—all the things that preoccupied me were Lessing’s subjects, and I can remember how many times I put the book down, reeling from its brilliance and insights.
Cut to a few years later. The couch is covered with purple slipcovers, and I’m reading for pure pleasure—it’s The Godfather by Mario Puzo, a divine book that sweeps me off into a wave of romantic delirium. I want to be a mafioso! No, that’s not quite right. Okay then, I want to be a mafioso’s wife!
A few years later, I’m divorced. No surprise there. The couch and I have moved to a dark apartment in the West Fifties. It’s a summer weekend, I have nothing whatsoever to do, and I should be lonely but I’m not—I’m reading the collected works of Raymond Chandler.
Six years later, another divorce. For weeks I’ve been unable to focus, to settle down, to read anything at all. A friend I’m staying with gives me the bound galleys of Smiley’s People. I sink into bed in the guest bedroom and happily surrender to John le Carré. I love John le Carré, but I’m even more in love with his hero, George Smiley, the spy with the broken heart. I want George Smiley to get over his broken heart. I want him to get over his horrible ex-wife who betrayed him. I want George Smiley to fall in love. I want George Smiley to fall in love with me. George Smiley, come to think of it, is exactly the sort of person I ought to marry and never do. I make a mental note to write John le Carré a letter giving him the benefit of my wisdom on this score.
But meanwhile, my purple couch is lost in the divorce and I buy a new couch, a wonderful squishy thing covered with a warm, cozy fabric, with arms you can lie back on and cushions you can sink into, depending on whether you want to read sitting up or lying down. On it I read most of Anthony Trollope and all of Edith Wharton, both of whom are dead and can’t be written to. Too bad; I’d like to tell them their books are as contemporary as they were when they were written. I read all of Jane Austen, six novels back to back, and spend days blissfully worrying over whether the lovers in each book will ever overcome the misunderstandings, objections, misapprehensions, character flaws, class distinctions, and all the other obstacles to love. I read these novels in a state of suspense so intense that you would never guess I have read them all at least ten times before.
And finally, one day, I read the novel that is probably the most rapture-inducing book of my adult life. On a chaise longue at the beach on a beautiful summer day, I open Wilkie Collins’s masterpiece, The Woman in White, probably the first great work of mystery fiction ever written (although that description hardly does it justice), and I am instantly lost to the world. Days pass as I savor every word. Each minute I spend away from the book pretending to be interested in everyday life is a misery. How could I have waited so long to read this book? When can I get back to it? Halfway through, I return to New York to work, to finish a movie, and I sit in the mix studio unable to focus on anything but whether my favorite character in the book will survive. I will not be able to bear it if anything bad happens to my beloved Marian Halcombe. Every so often I look up from the book and see a roomful of people waiting for me to make a decision about whether the music is too soft or the thunder is too loud, and I can’t believe they don’t understand that what I’m doing is Much More Important. I’m reading the most wonderful book.
There’s something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can’t tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he’s liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can’t adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All this happens to me when I surface from a great book. The book I’ve currently surfaced from—the one I mentioned at the beginning of this piece—is called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. It’s about two men who create comic-book characters, but it’s also about how artists create fantastic and magical things from the events of everyday life. At one point in the book there’s a roomful of moths, and then a few pages later there’s a huge luna moth sitting in a maple tree in Union Square Park—and all of this is reinvented a few pages later as a female comic-book heroine named Luna Moth. The moment where the image turns from ordinary to fantastic was so magical that I had to put down the book. I was dazed by the playfulness of th
e author and his ability to do something so difficult with such apparent ease. Chabon’s novel takes place in New York City in the 1940s, and though I finished reading it more than a week ago, I’m still there. I’m smoking Camels, and Salvador Dalí is at a party in the next room. Eventually, I’ll have to start breathing the air in today’s New York again, but on the other hand, perhaps I won’t have to. I’ll find another book I love and disappear into it. Wish me luck.
What I Wish I’d Known
People have only one way to be.
Buy, don’t rent.
Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.
Don’t cover a couch with anything that isn’t more or less beige.
Don’t buy anything that is 100 percent wool even if it seems to be very soft and not particularly itchy when you try it on in the store.
You can’t be friends with people who call after 11 p.m.
Block everyone on your instant mail.
The world’s greatest babysitter burns out after two and a half years.
You never know.
The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money.
The plane is not going to crash.
Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five.
At the age of fifty-five you will get a saggy roll just above your waist even if you are painfully thin.
This saggy roll just above your waist will be especially visible from the back and will force you to reevaluate half the clothes in your closet, especially the white shirts.
Write everything down.
Keep a journal.
Take more pictures.
The empty nest is underrated.
You can order more than one dessert.
You can’t own too many black turtleneck sweaters.
If the shoe doesn’t fit in the shoe store, it’s never going to fit.
When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.
Back up your files.
Overinsure everything.
Whenever someone says the words “Our friendship is more important than this,” watch out, because it almost never is.
There’s no point in making piecrust from scratch.
The reason you’re waking up in the middle of the night is the second glass of wine.
The minute you decide to get divorced, go see a lawyer and file the papers.
Overtip.
Never let them know.
If only one third of your clothes are mistakes, you’re ahead of the game.
If friends ask you to be their child’s guardian in case they die in a plane crash, you can say no.
There are no secrets.
Considering the Alternative
When I turned sixty, I had a big birthday party in Las Vegas, which happens to be one of my top five places. We spent the weekend eating and drinking and gambling and having fun. One of my friends threw twelve passes at the craps table and we all made some money and screamed and yelled and I went to bed deliriously happy. The spell lasted for several days, and as a result, I managed to avoid thinking about what it all meant. Denial has been a way of life for me for many years. I actually believe in denial. It seemed to me that the only way to deal with a birthday of this sort was to do everything possible to push it from my mind. Nothing else about me is better than it was at fifty, or forty, or thirty, but I definitely have the best haircut I’ve ever had, I like my new apartment, and, as the expression goes, consider the alternative.
I have been sixty for four years now, and by the time you read this I will probably have been sixty for five. I survived turning sixty, I was not thrilled to turn sixty-one, I was less thrilled to turn sixty-two, I didn’t much like being sixty-three, I loathed being sixty-four, and I will hate being sixty-five. I don’t let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyannaish. 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. There are dreams that are never quite going to come true, ambitions that will never quite be realized. There are, in short, regrets. Edith Piaf was famous for singing a song called “Non, je ne regrette rien.” It’s a good song. I know what she meant. I can get into it; I can make a case that I regret nothing. After all, most of my mistakes turned out to be things I survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from. But the truth is that je regrette beaucoup.
There are all sorts of books written for older women. They are, as far as I can tell, uniformly upbeat and full of bromides and homilies about how pleasant life can be once one is free from all the nagging obligations of children, monthly periods, and, in some cases, full-time jobs. I find these books utterly useless, just as I found all the books I once read about menopause utterly useless. Why do people write books that say it’s better to be older than to be younger? It’s not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you’re constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday. Even if you’re in great shape, you can’t chop an onion the way you used to and you can’t ride a bicycle several miles without becoming a candidate for traction. If you work, you’re surrounded by young people who are plugged into the marketplace, the demographic, the zeitgeist; they want your job and someday soon they’re going to get it. If you’re fortunate enough to be in a sexual relationship, you’re not going to have the sex you once had. Plus, you can’t wear a bikini. Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re thirty-four.
A magazine editor called me the other day, an editor who, like me, is over sixty. Her magazine was going to do an issue on Age, and she wanted me to write something for it. We began to talk about the subject, and she said, “You know what drives me nuts? Why do women our age say, ‘In my day…’? This is our day.”
But it isn’t our day. It’s their day. We’re just hanging on. We can’t wear tank tops, we have no idea who 50 Cent is, and we don’t know how to use almost any of the functions on our cell phones. If we hit the wrong button on the remote control and the television screen turns to snow, we have no idea how to get the television set back to where it was in the first place. (This is the true nightmare of the empty nest: Your children are gone, and they were the only people in the house who knew how to use the remote control.) Technology is a bitch. I can no longer even figure out how to get the buttons on the car radio to play my favorite stations. The gears on my bicycle mystify me. On my bicycle! And thank God no one has given me a digital wristwatch. In fact, if any of my friends are reading this, please don’t ever give me a digital anything.
Just the other day I went shopping at a store in Los Angeles that happens to stock jeans that actually come all the way up to my waist, and I was stunned to discover that the customer just before me was Nancy Reagan. That’s how old I am: Nancy Reagan and I shop in the same store.
Anyway, I said to this editor, you’re wrong, you are so wrong, this is not our day, this is their day. But she was undaunted. She said to me, well then, I have another idea: Why don’t you write about Age Shame? I said to her, get someone who is only fifty to write about Age Shame. I am way past Age Shame, if I ever had it. I’m just happy to be here at all.
Anyway, the point is, I don’t know why so much nonsense about age is written—although I can certainly understand that no one really wants to read anything that says aging sucks. We are a generation that has learned to believe we can do something about almost everything. We are active—hell, we are proactive. We are positive thinkers. We have the power. We will take any suggestion seriously. If a pill will help, we will take it. If being in the Zone will
help, we will enter the Zone. When we hear about the latest ludicrously expensive face cream that is alleged to turn back the clock, we will go out and buy it even though we know that the last five face creams we fell for were completely ineffectual. We will do crossword puzzles to ward off Alzheimer’s and eat six almonds a day to ward off cancer; we will scan ourselves to find whatever can be nipped in the bud. We are in control. Behind the wheel. On the cutting edge. We make lists. We seek out the options. We surf the net.
But there are some things that are absolutely, definitively, entirely uncontrollable.
I am dancing around the D word, but I don’t mean to be coy. 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.
Meanwhile, your friends die, and you’re left not just bereft, not just grieving, not just guilty, but utterly helpless. There is nothing you can do. Everybody dies.
“What is the answer?” Gertrude Stein asked Alice B. Toklas as Stein was dying.
There was no reply.
“In that case, what is the question?” Stein asked.
Well, exactly.
Well, not quite exactly. Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really going to have to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in America is so unbelievably delicious? And what about chocolate? There’s a question for you, Gertrude Stein—what about chocolate?
