Baskadia

Nora Ephron has mastered the art of seeming likeable - a rarer facility than one might think. In tone and touch, her essay collection I Feel Bad About My Neck makes a useful bible for those of us who foster the less useful knack for seeming irritating.

The secret appears to be to include a generous measure of beguiling self-deprecation, the humility slyly at odds with prose that is searingly smart. To be revealing only to the degree that you are funny, never to the degree that you plead for sympathy. After all, so grateful is the average reader to laugh or even cock a smile that few will troll these droll selections without being charmed to bits.

The title essay is typically dry and undemandingly confiding. Ephron is ashamed of her neck. True enough, despite state-of-the-art concealers, collagen injections and Botox, the feature that most reliably betrays a woman's age these days is her neck: "You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn't have to if it had a neck." While these giveaway striations, wattles and folds do admit to surgical solutions, Ephron is loath to confront in the mirror "a stranger who looks suspiciously like a drum pad".

"I Hate My Purse" is endearing, starting with the title. Within a woman's handbag, you can read the tea-leaves of a woman's character - doubtless literal tea leaves, from that packet of Earl Grey you swiped from a Chicago hotel room in 1983, along with "a morass of loose Tic Tacs, solitary Advils, lipsticks without tops, Chap Sticks of unknown vintage, little bits of tobacco even though there has been no smoking going on for at least 10 years, ... English coins from a trip to London last October ... and an unprotected toothbrush that looks as if it has been used to polish silver". That painfully familiar snapshot helps to explain why I have eschewed handbags for years, although substitute receptacles - bike panniers, backpacks, a large-pocketed leather jacket - collect the same humiliating detritus, amid which the everywoman can never locate what she's looking for. "A flashlight would help, but if you were to put one into your purse, you'd never find it."