I Remember Nothing

Ephron's humorous observations on aging so beloved in I Feel Bad About My Neck continue in this collection of sprightly essays on everything from her deep affection for Google to memories of her complicated relationship with the famously irascible playwright, Lillian Hellmann. Ephron's voice has a nice grain to it, but where it should skip and flow to mimic the conversational patter of her prose, it stumbles and drags. Ephron enunciates so carefully and pauses so haltingly, the audiobook sounds more like bad amateur theater rather than an acclaimed humorist reading her own material. Stripped of the author's light touch and self-deprecation, the jokes fall flat, and Ephron's quips on, say, going to the bookstore to buy a book on Alzheimer's and forgetting the name of the book, are likely to elicits more cringes than chuckles. A Knopf hardcover. (Dec.)