You Feel So Mortal: Essays on the Body

A collection of essays about the body?but don’t let that put you off. Like the late Nora Ephron’s fabulous book of reckoning with her aging body?I Hate My Neck?this witty, sometimes-hilarious manuscript turns the category of body books on its,well, ear. The essays have various points of departure?Jewish feet, posture, hair, autopsies. Some explore the problem of having a body; how to live in a woman’s body; in a Jew’s body. What does it mean to have the body as a proxy for the soul? Some of the essays are interested in the disposition of the body under emotional or physical duress: for example, ?Pocketing” archly explores the myth that shoplifting is a distinctly female activity, even a mania linked to the womb. ?Debutante, Dowager, Beggar” is a sad, funny story about Shinner’s uptight mother, a binge eater and Dr. Spock devotee, who, like many American women in the fifties, worried herself sick about posture, especially that of her daughter’s and how rounded shoulders would undermine her ability to succeed in life. ?Family Feet” takes a look at feet through the often-skewed lens of history, and discovers that Shinner’s flat-footed specimens are, according to some, decidedly and disturbingly Jewish, ?The Fitting(s)” breasts, and the storied bra fitte Ida Rosenthal, founder of Maidenform. ?Post-Mortem,” an essay about autopsies, looks at the body at rest, or presumably at rest, and asks the question, from a confused and grieving daughter’s point of view, what does it mean to cut the body open? To take a peek inside? And ?Berenice’s Hair” is a reeling time-trip through myth, culture, and history, looking at women’s hair from ancient Rome to present-day India, with stops in Laos, France, Syria, Cuba, the United States.