By Pam Walatka

Nora Ephron, one of America’s top humorists, has come out with a new book, “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman” (Knopf, 2006).

Who over 50 doesn’t feel bad about their neck? No part of the human body exhibits aging more cruelly than the neck. Ephron writes, “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.”

Ephron’s talent is to zero in on common experience and skewer it with her wit. Although she lives in Manhattan, far from the ground, she has a down-to-earth way of writing that makes you laugh, without forgetting how hard it is to get through a life.

She earned an Oscar nomination for the “When Harry Met Sally” screenplay. Even if you have not seen the movie, you probably have heard about the scene in a restaurant when Meg Ryan’s character demonstrates for Billy Crystal’s character how women fake it. A lady at the next table says, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Ephron writes about her life. After her marriage to Carl Bernstein (Woodward & Bernstein/Watergate) failed, she wrote “Heartburn.”

In her current book, a chapter about cooking picks up after that episode in her life: “Meanwhile, I got married again, and divorced again. I wrote a thinly disguised novel about the end of my marriage, and it contained recipes.” The “Heartburn” plot in a nutshell: He falls in love with someone else.

And yet the humor continues.

She advises women to appreciate the bodies they have now. “One of my biggest regrets - bigger even than not buying the apartment on East Seventy-fifth Street, bigger even than my worst romantic catastrophe - is that I didn’t spend my youth staring lovingly at my neck. It never crossed my mind to be grateful for it.”

Her humor is of the Erma Bombeck, “I’m-such-a-klutz” variety. She has a chapter on not being able to keep her purse in any reasonable order, nor being able to change purses to match different outfits. Talking about a system for changing purses, she writes, “This system works for most people but not for me, and for a fairly obvious reason, which I’ve already disclosed: I’m not an organized human being.” Women who are capable of changing purses frequently will find themselves in other chapters, perhaps those on cooking, moving or parenting. She skewers the whole idea of “parenting” becoming a word.

In one chapter she bemoans the loss of her ability to read without first finding her reading glasses. Reading is as important to her as breathing. One wonders why she didn’t insist on setting this book in bigger type.

She spends a lot of time at her computer. “Only yesterday, while surfing the net, I discovered that there’s an expression for what I am - a mouse potato. It means someone as connected to her computer as couch potatoes are to their television sets.”

Summing up her life (in the chapter “The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less”) and talking about how everything that happens can be something to write about, she says, “I can’t get over this aspect of journalism. I can’t believe how real life never lets you down. I can’t understand why anyone would write fiction when what actually happens is so amazing.”

“I Feel Bad About My Neck” is available at Main Street Cafe & Books, 134 Main St., Los Altos.