You Don't Look Your Age...and Other Fairy Tales

by Sheila Nevins

Overview

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Thank you to Sheila Nevins for putting all this down for posterity. Women need this kind of honest excavation of the process of living.” —Meryl Streep

An astonishingly frank, funny, poignant book for any woman who wishes they had someone who would say to them, “This happened to me, learn from my mistakes and my successes. Because you don’t get smarter as you get older, you get braver.”

Sheila Nevins is the best friend you never knew you had. She is your discreet confidante you can tell any secret to, your sage mentor at work who helps you navigate the often uneven playing field, your wise sister who has “been there, done that,” your hysterical girlfriend whose stories about men will make laugh until you cry. Sheila Nevins is the one person who always tells it like it is.

In You Don’t Look Your Age, the famed documentary producer (as President of HBO Documentary Films for over 30 years, Nevins has rightfully been credited with creating the documentary rebirth) finally steps out from behind the camera and takes her place front and center.

In these pages you will read about the real life challenges of being a woman in a man's world, what it means to be a working mother, what it’s like to be an older woman in a youth-obsessed culture, the sometimes changing, often sweet truth about marriages, what being a feminist really means, and that you are in good company if your adult children don’t return your phone calls.

So come, sit down, make yourself comfortable, (and for some of you, don’t forget the damn reading glasses). You’re in for a treat.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250111302
Publisher:	Flatiron Books
Publication date:	05/02/2017
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Sheila Nevins has a BA from Barnard and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and is a television producer and the President of HBO Documentary Films. She has produced over one thousand documentary films for HBO and is one of the most influential people in documentary filmmaking. She has worked on productions that have been recognized with 32 Primetime Emmy Awards, 34 News and Doc Emmy Awards, 42 Peabody Awards, and 26 Academy Awards. Nevins has won 32 individual Primetime Emmy Awards, more than any other person.

Table of Contents

Why She Wrote When She Wrote 1

Facing Face-lifts 5

Chills in the Hot Sun 17

Heartbreak 21

Expensive Clothes 25

The Elephant in the Room 31

Separate Bedrooms for Marcia and Larry 35

From Cosmo to Ms. 41

Chocolate Chemo 49

The Giant Named Tourette's 53

Little Blue Pill 61

Jeremy Hit Rock Bottom 65

The Dictator, the Farmer, and the Professor 71

To Sleep or Not to Sleep 75

The Art of the Faux Pas 79

Eavesdropping on Adultery 83

Par for the Course 89

Trudie Foodie 95

Her Disappearing Act 101

Mammogram Day 103

Labor Day Weekend Labors: A Hateful Three Days 107

A Dog's Dying 115

First Kiss 119

I Hated Teddy and Teddy Hated Me 123

The Humble Beginnings of My Somewhat Spiritual Self 133

Picture Perfect (Almost) 137

To Lose a Child 141

The Larry Kramer 145

Melissa Van Holdenvas 153

A Day at Will 159

Frenemy 163

Letter to a Dead Great-Aunt: A Personal Memoir 169

A Million-Dollar Smile 175

Eunice's Period Stopped 179

Did You Ever See a Book Cry? 185

Advice to Women in a Male-Dominated Workplace 189

Do You Believe in Santa Claus? 195

The Cookie Wars: WM. vs. Mrs. Spatz 199

Mentor Not 205

The Day She Lost Her Jealousy at Barneys 215

Imaginary/Real 219

What's in a Name? 227

A Man with a Scythe Rang My Doorbell 233

+1.75: An Insight 237

Gliding Gracefully into Gravity 241

The Wrong Kind of Hot 245

To Fur or Not to Fur: Eden's Dilemma 251

The Art of Book Signing 259

Acknowledgments 267

Editorial Reviews

Audio book read by:
Alan Alda, Bob Balaban, Christine Baranski, Kathy Bates, Ellen Burstyn, Glenn Close, Katie Couric, Blythe Danner, Lena Dunham, Edie Falco, Tovah Feldshuh, Diane von Furstenberg, Whoopi Goldberg, Gayle King, Sandra Lee, Judith Light, Jenna Lyons, Audra McDonald, Janet Mock, Rosie O'Donnell, RuPaul, Liz Smith, Lesley Stahl, Gloria Steinem, Martha Stewart, Meryl Streep, Marlo Thomas, Lily Tomlin, and Gloria Vanderbilt.

“Thank you to Sheila Nevins for putting all this down for posterity. Women need this kind of honest excavation of the process of living.”
—Meryl Streep

“This book is gorgeous. I was blown away. The piece about Nevins’ mother is stunning. There is such range to this collection. Funny but always honest.”
—Delia Ephron

“Brave, honest and inspiring.”
—Edie Falco

“Fearless! Funny! Honest! I loooove it!
—Diane Von Furstenberg

“Funny, sad, insightful, clever, touching! I was immediately captivated…There were moments when I thought Nevins was sharing secrets with me…I loved them all. This was a special read, and when I’d finished I felt I’d been given an unexpected present.”
—Barbara Taylor Bradford

From the Publisher

2017-03-07
A miscellany of musings about aging, love, work, and wisdom.Nevins (b. 1939), an acclaimed producer of TV documentaries who has won numerous Emmy, Peabody, and other awards, makes her literary debut with a collection of essays, poetry, and stories, often entertaining and, as she admits, "sometimes silly." Frequently, her theme is the assault of aging, beginning with her decision to get a face- and eye-lift, at the age of 56. At the surgeon's office, examining her face in a magnifying mirror, she was horrified: "I saw a wrinkled, witchlike, scrunched up, squashed face," she recalls. Working in media, she believed she had to hide her age. "Nobody wanted advice from an old broad," she writes. Her surgery, though, intensified her obsession with her looks. "I heard a metronome ticking in my head" that made her focus on every wrinkle, rushing to her dermatologist for every "new fix." Nevins also spent huge amounts of money on her teeth. She wishes she could face aging gracefully, but being surrounded by pretty, bright, and slender young women makes her angry. Besides aging, dieting, Viagra, and menopause, the author records a conversation overheard on a train between two women, one of whom, it turns out, was having an affair with the other's husband. "I wished John Updike was around to hear them," Nevins remarks. Other pieces focus on family: her demanding, impatient mother, who had a form of Reynaud's disease so severe that her forearm needed to be amputated; and her son, who slowly developed Tourette's syndrome when he was 3. "Tourette's," Nevins writes, "would crush and stomp on all dreams of normalcy." Nevins reflects candidly about her encounter with the anti-Semitic mother of a college boyfriend. "This mother deemed me unworthy," she writes, but that woman became her "mentor" as she earned accolades and awards. "Every yes to me was a slap in her face." As in many collections, some of the pieces are disposable, but the best ones are honest, opinionated, and spirited.

Kirkus Reviews

A diverse collection of poems, short stories, and anecdotes from HBO’s president of documentary films is narrated by an A-list celebrity cast, including Alan Alda, Lena Dunham, Meryl Streep, and others. They’re filled with heartwarming memories, quirky tongue-in-cheek recollections, regretful experiences, successes and failures, attempts to reverse aging, and a multitude of other relatable topics that will touch listeners' hearts—and that goes for either sex. Sheila Nevins cleverly recruited storytellers to celebrate and explore real life, sickness and death, anxiety, love lost, and life's mistakes made over all the hills and valleys of time. They provide perspective and courage to listeners and serve as proof that we're all in this life together, sharing the same types of experiences. B.J.P. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

JULY 2017 - AudioFile