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A review by surlaroute
Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women by Nora Ephron
3.0
I’ll be honest, I don’t think I would’ve read this - at least, I wouldn’t have made it the first Nora Ephron book I read - if I’d known it was just a collection of her articles, and quite a mish-mashed one at that (a book review here, op-ed there, investigative journalism, miniature biography, you name it…) But since it was in my queue, I went ahead anyway. As the title suggests, the articles aren’t without a common theme, but the quality and relevance varies wildly.
The highlight for me was the one about feminine hygiene spray - a still highly relevant look at how companies create need for a possibly unnecessary product as part of their marketing. I found the ones about the women in Nixon’s life - his daughter and secretary - very interesting too. What I’ll also say is it became clear to me how much we could use a voice like Ephron’s again today as we come more and more dangerously close to absolutist thinking, especially when it comes to things like feminism. What I mean by that is neatly encapsulated in this paragraph from the article titled “Truth and Consequences”:
“The problem, I’m afraid, is that as a writer my commitment is to something that, God help me, I think of as The Truth, and as a feminist my commitment is to the women’s movement. And ever since I became loosely involved with it, it has seemed to me one of the recurring ironies of this movement that there is no way to tell the truth about it without, in some small way, seeming to hurt it.”
This slight ambivalence feeds into most of Ephron’s writing here, and I expect it’s why I’ve increasingly come to admire the movies that ultimately (with Julie and Julia, and her blu-ray commentary on that movie) led me to want to read her earlier prose. This mightn’t have been the best start on that, but It (even the last, most awkwardly dated, chapter about a trans woman) certainly didn’t put me off reading the rest of her work.
The highlight for me was the one about feminine hygiene spray - a still highly relevant look at how companies create need for a possibly unnecessary product as part of their marketing. I found the ones about the women in Nixon’s life - his daughter and secretary - very interesting too. What I’ll also say is it became clear to me how much we could use a voice like Ephron’s again today as we come more and more dangerously close to absolutist thinking, especially when it comes to things like feminism. What I mean by that is neatly encapsulated in this paragraph from the article titled “Truth and Consequences”:
“The problem, I’m afraid, is that as a writer my commitment is to something that, God help me, I think of as The Truth, and as a feminist my commitment is to the women’s movement. And ever since I became loosely involved with it, it has seemed to me one of the recurring ironies of this movement that there is no way to tell the truth about it without, in some small way, seeming to hurt it.”
This slight ambivalence feeds into most of Ephron’s writing here, and I expect it’s why I’ve increasingly come to admire the movies that ultimately (with Julie and Julia, and her blu-ray commentary on that movie) led me to want to read her earlier prose. This mightn’t have been the best start on that, but It (even the last, most awkwardly dated, chapter about a trans woman) certainly didn’t put me off reading the rest of her work.