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You don't look your age-- and other fairy tales / Sheila Nevins.

by Nevins, Sheila.

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Flatiron Books, 2017.

791.430232 N528y

Nevins, Sheila.

Women television producers and directors -- United States -- Biography.

Women -- Aging -- Essays.

Aging -- Anecdotes.

Sex discrimination.

9781250111302 (hc.)

ix, 255 pages ; 22 cm

Why she wrote when she wrote -- Facing face-lifts -- Chills in the hot sun -- Heartbreak -- Expensive clothes -- The elephant in the room -- Separate bedrooms for Marcia and Larry -- From Cosmo to Ms. -- Chocolate chemo -- The giant named Tourette's -- Little blue pill -- Jeremy hit rock bottom -- The dictator, the farmer, and the professor -- To sleep or not to sleep -- The art of the faux pas -- Eavesdropping on adultery -- Par for the course -- Trudie foodie -- Her disappearing act -- Mammogram day -- Labor Day weekend labors : a hateful three days -- A dog's dying -- First kiss -- I hated Teddy and Teddy hated me -- The humble beginnings of my somewhat spiritual self -- Picture perfect (almost) -- To lose a child -- The Larry Kramer -- Melissa Van Holdenvas -- A day at will -- Frenemy -- Letter to a dead great-aunt : a personal memoir -- A million-dollar smile -- Eunice's period. Stopped. -- Did you ever see a book cry? -- Advice to women in a male-dominated workplace -- Do you believe in Santa Claus? -- The cookie wars : W.M. vs. Mrs. Spatz -- Mentor not -- The day she lost her jealousy at Barneys -- Imaginary/real -- What's in a name? -- A man with a scythe rang my doorbell -- +1.75 : an insight -- Gliding gracefully into gravity -- The wrong kind of hot.

A miscellany of musings about aging, love, work, and wisdom. Nevins, a producer of TV documentaries who has won numerous Emmy, Peabody, and other awards, makes her literary debut with a collection of essays, poetry, and stories, often entertaining and, as she admits, sometimes silly. Frequently, her theme is the assault of aging, beginning with her decision to get a face- and eye-lift, at the age of 56. At the surgeon's office, examining her face in a magnifying mirror, she was horrified: "I saw a wrinkled, witchlike, scrunched up, squashed face," she recalls. Working in media, she believed she had to hide her age. "Nobody wanted advice from an old broad," she writes. Her surgery, though, intensified her obsession with her looks. "I heard a metronome ticking in my head" that made her focus on every wrinkle, rushing to her dermatologist for every new fix. Nevins also spent huge amounts of money on her teeth. She wishes she could face aging gracefully, but being surrounded by pretty, bright, and slender young women makes her angry. Besides aging, dieting, Viagra, and menopause, the author records a conversation overheard on a train between two women, one of whom, it turns out, was having an affair with the other's husband. "I wished John Updike was around to hear them," Nevins remarks. Other pieces focus on family: her demanding, impatient mother, who had a form of Reynaud's disease so severe that her forearm needed to be amputated; and her son, who slowly developed Tourette's syndrome when he was 3. Sheila Nevins is an American television producer and the President of HBO Documentary Films. She has produced over one thousand documentary films and is one of the most influential people in documentary filmmaking.

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