I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

by Nora Ephron

Most people who don’t live in New York have no idea that New Yorkers have exactly the same sense of neighborhood that supposedly exists in small-town America; in the Apthorp, this sense is magnified because the courtyard provides countless opportunities for its residents to bump into one another and eventually learn one another’s names.

Why hadn’t I realized how much of what I thought of as love was simply my own highly developed gift for making lemonade? What failure of imagination had caused me to forget that life was full of other possibilities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?

Or, as E. L. Doctorow once wrote, far more succinctly “I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative.”