“VENERDÌ RE-VERSO”
“It was horribly clear that my life up to that point had been a mistake.”
“There are books that should be prescribed in a pharmacy: read 5 pages a day. Therapeutic indications: relieves and reduces the pain of living (and immediately a young Leopardi appears to us intent on stealing the secrets of the female universe and, above all, of good humor).
“I feel bad about my neck” reminded us of a more recent collection of essays, that of Rachel Cusk (Coventry, Einaudi, 2024), which however is not endowed with the same pervasive humor. What they have in common is a certain sense of honesty, they are women of different generations and yet their way of being in society, in the family, in motherhood and in a woman’s body is characterized by the same fragile and strong posture at the same time that makes us feel a little more at ease with the difficulties of the world. A way of holding our heads high in the middle of a tsunami. Reading these women is truly, profoundly, comforting. Because we found ourselves laughing at our naivety, at our contradictions, at our small and large fixations – we laughed at that anything but funny battle that consists in accepting ourselves every day for what we are.
We looked into the depths of our mistakes like Ephron looks into the depths of his bag: with… benevolence? Resignation? Maybe just kindness. There is a chapter among the others that is particularly caustic, it is entitled “Maintenance” – a term that we have been taught to associate with more poetic words like “senses” or “affections”. Ephron is careful not to do so. He talks about hair, pounds, skin. He basically says that maintenance is everything you do to avoid having to hide from the unfortunate appearance of an ex, who may have even dumped you. An archetypal manifestation of discomfort. As a famous stand-up comedian would say, “OF COURSE…” we shouldn’t care a bit, “…BUT MAYBE” we do care a little, deep down we don’t want him to think “I had a lucky escape”, that’s it.
We could argue but we won’t, we will instead accept the fact that we use, more or less, a part of the time we are granted in this life to obtain a dignified reflection in the mirror; in a historical period defined by the mantra of “you have to like yourself”, “you’re fine just the way you are”, reading this chapter alleviates a little the shame for all that coterie of stratagems, more or less visible, that we use every morning to face the rest of humanity.
Once again, Ephron does nothing to mask her privileges, her status, the reality in which she lives: they are certainly not standards that apply to everyone, she knows that well. But everything, everything, is in the way she tells her story: self-irony saves her, saves us. How much sense does it really make to always take ourselves seriously? Not admitting weaknesses and at the same time magnifying them inside us, making them enormous, sometimes paralyzing? No, gentlemen of the jury, it makes no sense. We won’t escape our baseness, the fact that we still think about certain phrases that Mom told us, the fact that no matter how hard we try, we might not be the parents we wanted to be, the fact that there are some things we would have liked to have known before but, hey, we didn’t. We won’t escape the wrong loves, the trends, the failed attempts to be happy. We won’t escape not being able to do anything for friends who leave before their time, the things we would have liked to say. So? On every page the answer: do your best. Live. “You can order more than one dessert.”
Written by Delis
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Nora Ephron, Il collo mi fa impazzire, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2007
Original edition: I feel bad about my neck,Alfred A. Knopf, 2006