Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble: Some Things about Women and Notes on the Media

by Nora Ephron

Overview

From the bestselling author of I Feel Bad About My Neck: two classic collections of uproarious essays tackling everything from feminism to the media, from politics to beauty products, with her inimitable charm and distinctive wit.

This edition brings together some of Ephron’s most famous writing on a generation of women (and men) who helped shape the way we live now, and on events ranging from the Watergate scandal to the Pillsbury Bake-Off. In these sharp, hilariously entertaining, and vividly observed pieces, Ephron illuminates an era with wicked honesty and insight. From the famous “A Few Words About Breasts” to important pieces on her time working for the New York Post and Gourmet Magazine, these essays show Ephron at her very best.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345804730
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/18/2012
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Nora Ephron was the author of Crazy Salad, Heartburn, Wallflower at the Orgy, and Scribble Scribble. She received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay for When Harry Met Sally, Silkwood, and Sleepless in Seattle, which she also directed. She died in 2012.

Read an Excerpt

A FEW WORDS ABOUT BREASTS

I have to begin with a few words about androgyny. In grammar school, in the fifth and sixth grades, we were all tyrannized by a rigid set of rules that supposedly determined whether we were boys or girls. The episode in Huckleberry Finn where Huck is disguised as a girl and gives himself away by the way he threads a needle and catches a ball-that kind of thing. We learned that the way you sat, crossed your legs, held a cigarette, and looked at your nails-the way you did these things instinctively was absolute proof of your sex. Now obviously most children did not take this literally, but I did. I thought that just one slip, just one incorrect cross of my legs or flick of an imaginary cigarette ash would turn me from whatever I was into the other thing; that would be all it took, really. Even though I was outwardly a girl and had many of the trappings generally associated with girldom-a girl's name, for example, and dresses, my own telephone, an autograph book-I spent the early years of my adolescence absolutely certain that I might at any point gum it up. I did not feel at all like a girl. I was boyish. I was athletic, ambitious, outspoken, competitive, noisy, rambunctious. I had scabs on my knees and my socks slid into my loafers and I could throw a football. I wanted desperately not to be that way, not to be a mixture of both things, but instead just one, a girl, a definite indisputable girl. As soft and as pink as a nursery. And nothing would do that for me, I felt, but breasts.

I was about six months younger than everyone else in my class, and so for about six months after it began, for six months after my friends had begun to develop (that was the word we used, develop), I was not particularly worried. I would sit in the bathtub and look down at my breasts and know that any day now, any second now, they would start growing like everyone else's. They didn't. "I want to buy a bra," I said to my mother one night. "What for?" she said. My mother was really hateful about bras, and by the time my third sister had gotten to the point where she was ready to want one, my mother had worked the whole business into a comedy routine. "Why not use a Band-Aid instead?" she would say. It was a source of great pride to my mother that she had never even had to wear a brassiere until she had her fourth child, and then only because her gynecologist made her. It was incomprehensible to me that anyone could ever be proud of something like that. It was the 1950s, for God's sake. Jane Russell. Cashmere sweaters. Couldn't my mother see that? "I am too old to wear an undershirt." Screaming. Weeping. Shouting. "Then don't wear an undershirt," said my mother. "But I want to buy a bra." "What for?"

I suppose that for most girls, breasts, brassieres, that entire thing, has more trauma, more to do with the coming of adolescence, with becoming a woman, than anything else. Certainly more than getting your period, although that, too, was traumatic, symbolic. But you could see breasts; they were there; they were visible. Whereas a girl could claim to have her period for months before she actually got it and nobody would ever know the difference. Which is exactly what I did. All you had to do was make a great fuss over having enough nickels for the Kotex machine and walk around clutching your stomach and moaning for three to five days a month about The Curse and you could convince anybody. There is a school of thought somewhere in the women's lib/women's mag/gynecology establishment that claims that menstrual cramps are purely psychological, and I lean toward it. Not that I didn't have them finally. Agonizing cramps, heating-pad cramps, go-down-to-the-school-nurse-and-lie-on-the cot cramps. But, unlike any pain I had ever suffered, I adored the pain of cramps, welcomed it, wallowed in it, bragged about it. "I can't go. I have cramps." "I can't do that. I have cramps." And most of all, gigglingly, blushingly: "I can't swim. I have cramps." Nobody ever used the hard-core word. Menstruation. God, what an awful word. Never that. "I have cramps."

The morning I first got my period, I went into my mother's bedroom to tell her. And my mother, my utterly-hateful-about-bras mother, burst into tears. It was really a lovely moment, and I remember it so clearly not just because it was one of the two times I ever saw my mother cry on my account (the other was when I was caught being a six-year-old kleptomaniac), but also because the incident did not mean to me what it meant to her. Her little girl, her firstborn, had finally become a woman. That was what she was crying about. My reaction to the event, however, was that I might well be a woman in some scientific, textbook sense (and could at least stop faking every month and stop wasting all those nickels). But in another sense in a visible sense I was as androgynous and as liable to tip over into boyhood as ever.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A woman for all seasons, tender and tough in just the right proportions.” —The New York Times
 
“A tremendously talented woman from a significant American period. . . . tremendous talent is her forte, her strong suit, her fiendish trump card.” —The Washington Post 
  
“Truly funny and wonderfully wise.” —Chicago Tribune
 
“Witty whiplash prose—a delight to read.” —Publishers Weekly

 “Nora Ephron can write about anything better than anybody else can write about anything.” —The New York Times

“Stylish, opinionated, with a kind of take-no-prisoners fearlessness rooted in both the women’s movement and the equally complex terrain of her own emotions” —Los Angeles Times

“As tart and refreshing as the first gin and tonic of summer.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A brilliant, restless mind.” —Ms.

“Funny, shrewd, devastating.” —Newsweek

“Nora Ephron is, in essence, one of the original bloggers—and if everyone could write like her, what a lovely place the Internet would be. . . . telling stories that were, more often than not, ultimately about herself, and doing so with such warmth, wit and skill that they became universal.” —The Seattle Times 

 “Always funny.” —Mademoiselle

“Pure delight.” —Playboy

Editorial Reviews

A woman for all seasons, tender and tough in just the right proportions.” —The New York Times
 
“A tremendously talented woman from a significant American period. . . . tremendous talent is her forte, her strong suit, her fiendish trump card.” —The Washington Post 
  
“Truly funny and wonderfully wise.” —Chicago Tribune
 
“Witty whiplash prose—a delight to read.” —Publishers Weekly

 “Nora Ephron can write about anything better than anybody else can write about anything.” —The New York Times

“Stylish, opinionated, with a kind of take-no-prisoners fearlessness rooted in both the women’s movement and the equally complex terrain of her own emotions” —Los Angeles Times

“As tart and refreshing as the first gin and tonic of summer.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A brilliant, restless mind.” —Ms.

“Funny, shrewd, devastating.” —Newsweek

“Nora Ephron is, in essence, one of the original bloggers—and if everyone could write like her, what a lovely place the Internet would be. . . . telling stories that were, more often than not, ultimately about herself, and doing so with such warmth, wit and skill that they became universal.” —The Seattle Times 

 “Always funny.” —Mademoiselle

“Pure delight.” —Playboy

From the Publisher