A few years ago, I fell for the latest health trend: drinking copious quantities of water each day. Articles and social media posts promised that extreme hydration would give me glowing skin, better immunity and improved gut health. Who could pass those benefits up? I splurged on a HydroFlask—the water bottle of the moment—and even paid extra for a lid with a straw. A straw made drinking all that water easy and fun. My excitement for this water-drinking journey was through the roof.

About a month later as I sipped away in school, a friend shot me a concerned glance. “If I were you,” she warned, “I'd stop drinking from straws. They’ll give you terrible wrinkles.”

I stared back, nonplussed. Didn’t she know I was being healthy? Making myself more beautiful, glowing and energetic? Preventing countless (nameless) diseases I might someday get? I was doing the right thing! Right? I touched the area around my mouth, practically feeling the wrinkles form as she spoke. “Every sip you take stretches the skin on your face in ways that will show up very clearly, just wait fifteen years.”

Future wrinkles had not crossed my mind as something to worry about until this moment, and I’ll admit—though not without some amount of shame—that it made me immediately consider the countless symptoms of aging I should rush to prevent.

Nora Ephron, the esteemed author of I Feel Bad About My Neck, a collection of personal essays, warns her younger readers of the nightmare that is aging. The title of the book, taken from the first essay, “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” details her many neck-related qualms that come with age. One of her biggest regrets in life, she claims, is that she didn’t “spend [her] youth staring lovingly at [her] neck.”

She’s joking. Sort of. The melodramatic tone makes the reader chuckle, but as the chapter goes on, her sentiment starts to feel too sincere. She ends the chapter by stating that after living a long, interesting life, she finally understands, “just what matters.” It’s not love, knowledge, or kindness, like the reader may expect, but is simply: “[her] neck.”

Ephron was an accomplished journalist, writer, and filmmaker. She wrote many well known screenplays, including When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, but her personal essays (often written as magazine articles first) were some of her most famous works. By the time she wrote I Feel Bad About My Neck at sixty-five, she was well off, with a lot of free time on her hands. She spent a significant amount of her money and time maintaining her physical appearance—fighting, as she put it, “to remain presentable at the least, if not beautiful.”

A chapter worth highlighting in I Feel Bad About My Neck is titled “On Maintenance,” which details her extensive list of daily, weekly, and monthly beauty routines that she feels must be completed, no matter how grueling. It includes six sections: hair, hair dye, nails, unwanted hair, exercise, and skin, each one more burdensome than the last. She goes to great lengths in her pursuit of beauty: a professional hair blow-out twice a week, monthly highlights and hair dye, consistent manicures, eyebrow threading, daily exercise regimens, and cabinets full of every skin cream one could imagine.

Ephron writes about this all with a self-deprecating, satirical tone, half acknowledging that it’s way over-the-top. One of the funniest lines is that “not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.” The reader, she hopes, will laugh in recognition of the female predicament. But does this make it a joke? There is, upon further consideration, a depressing honesty in her candor, stripping it of humor. Why have beautiful hair if the effort it requires is so torturous? Why should death be the only escape?

She mentions that various rich friends of hers have proposed boat trips in the past, but she can’t help but want to pass them up because of how difficult it would be to “[struggle] with a blowdryer” on a boat. She is willing to forfeit an exciting life just to “look good,” by some arbitrary definition. It begs the question: why feel the need to look good in the first place? It is completely counterintuitive for someone to spend so much time grooming themselves to the point where they avoid interesting experiences.

Ephron used numerous techniques to preserve her beauty, such as anti-aging creams, dying gray hair brown, and botox. This desire to slow down the clock has only become more prevalent in our present day culture than it was when she wrote her essays. Nowadays it’s not uncommon for women in their twenties to pay for “preventative botox,” in the attempt to fight off wrinkles before they even have the chance to arrive. Many women spend all of their time preventing some abstract decline, living in fear of the future and depriving the present of any joy. This highlights the changing definition of what it means to be “beautiful,” because it’s no longer about being perceived by others. The obsession with physical appearance has turned into something far more vain, often acting as a coping mechanism: if all else is going wrong, one can at least feel beautiful. Looks are so attached to one’s sense of self and individual worth that when they’re lost with age, people are no longer sure of who they are. The strong link between physical appearance and self worth must be broken, not fed to be made stronger. So, is Ephron helping, hurting, or merely describing this predicament?

Rather than empowering, I find the brutal honesty in I Feel Bad About My Neck disheartening. Ephron’s essays are a firsthand account of how much effort it takes to be a woman in today’s world. Despite her sense of humor, there is a cynicism at the core of her thesis—a cynicism exacerbated by my own shame: even though I disagree with the morality of these all-consuming maintenance routines and levels of vanity, I will likely fall into their trap as I get older. This disheartening effect may be negative for the individual reader, but Ephron did effectively shine a light on the day-to-day requirements of many women’s lives, allowing men to glimpse what they don’t have to endure.

I Feel Bad About My Neck both reinforces and criticizes the notion that women must care so much about the way they look, depending on how one chooses to interpret it. Ephron obsessively catalogs her participation in these unfair beauty standards, while still shelling out big bucks and time to do so. She is pointing a finger, but not necessarily wagging it. Because of this duality her work ends up more like a lament than a critique.

In addition to the moral issues of spending hours each week maintaining one’s appearance, as Ephron does, there are also the practical aspects to consider. She visits her hair colorist every six weeks, and ends up spending “more per year than [her] first automobile.” This financial burden is relatable to almost every woman, even on a much smaller scale. I have a twin brother, and he is essentially the male version of myself. We worked many of the same jobs, and headed off to college with similar balances in our bank accounts. The other day, after sulking over spending far too much money on essential hygiene and beauty products, I asked him approximately how much he spent a month on similar products. He shrugged, “Maybe ten dollars? Toothpaste, deodorant, soap, what else does one really need?”

Oh, to be so oblivious. It’s difficult not to feel bitter about the different standards I feel we are held to. Being merely bitter, however, is a dead-end path. Ephron’s lighthearted style of writing about these topics helps soften their sharp messages. She touches on truths that others are too embarrassed to admit, making the reader feel as though they are listening to a friend. Her writing is not only relatable, it resonates, and it boldly addresses taboo subjects like vanity. Magazine shoots and social media posts rarely show the behind the scenes required to produce such beautiful images. It’s easier for consumers to ignore how and why the pictures came to be, and what such advertised beauty implies. It is simpler to buy into the myths, to try the products, to accept the beauty standards. Ephron could have complained, wallowing in the bitterness that comes with being a woman. Instead she chose to cope with the problem rather than address the root of it. The hours and hours of daily work she completes to maintain her looks expose a deeply ingrained vanity that so many people have, whether they like it or not. This vanity is not the fault of the individual, but a result of our society. Yes, Ephron goes to absurd lengths to keep up her physical appearance, but her honesty about this absurdity may inspire readers to fight against this norm in their own lives.

It’s unclear whether or not Ephron wrote with these intentions in mind, but after sitting with her thoughts I am resolved, as we all should be, to try not to feel bad about my neck—now or in the future.