Not exactly the kind of thing you expect to hear from someone who is doing a reading here tonight for which she would presumably like an audience.

"I was just using that old W.C. Fields joke," she protests on the phone from her hotel room in Washington, D.C., on the first day of her book tour. "It wasn't meant as a slam. It's just an expression, meaning 'I'd rather be somewhere other than exercising.'"

Yeah but W.C. Fields lived here before Stephen Starr and Franklin Square Mini Golf and so had some basis for his discontent. Whereas Ephron, 65, is a longtime New Yorker best known for being Sleepless in Seattle.

Anyone familiar with Ephron for that screenplay and her equally schmaltzy You've Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally... rather than her earlier journalism may be surprised by the bite of this book, which was inspired, she says, by the "boosterism garbage" she read while trying to find a book to help her through menopause. "They kept saying how great it was to get older. I kept wondering, 'Don't these people have necks?' — a central premise of the title essay being that you can wear all the makeup, concealer and hair dye, and shoot up with as much Botox and Restylane as you want: Nothing can hide an aged neck short of wearing mandarin collars that make her lunches with friends "look like a white ladies' version of The Joy Luck Club."

As for the rest of her body, she says she alternates between exercise, and physical therapy to heal injuries sustained during exercise. She tried swimming until she got swimmer's ear. "Have you ever had it? It's torture," she writes. "Water rattles around in your ear and itches so much that it wakes you up at night, and there's absolutely no way you can scratch it short of plunging your finger into your brain stem." Her theory about Van Gogh is that "he cut off his ear because he'd made the mistake of taking up swimming."

In other essays she rues her mustache, purse, bad eyesight and bad luck in being "the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House that the president did not make a pass at" (though we're thinking it could have been the mustache).

Two of the few feel-good pieces in Feel Bad are about food, a lifelong love here represented by a recounting of her decades-long search to find a cabbage strudel as good as the one made by a Hungarian bakery on Third Avenue in 1968. This is, after all, a woman who described her divorce from Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein in a thinly disguised autobiographical novel (and later movie) with recipes called Heartburn. (In Neck, she reveals that she took care to "change my first husband's cats into hamsters ... the British ambassador into an undersecretary of state, and ... give my second husband a beard.")

So perhaps it's not surprising to hear that she is now working on a screenplay about blogger Julie Powell's attempt to cook her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. "When I first heard about her blog I was wildly jealous," Ephron says, "until I realized I would have had to cook all the kidneys and aspics and quiches that are in there. Then I wasn't."

And what about another romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan?

"I'd do it tomorrow, if I had an idea for one," she says, and presumably also if, by then, Meg Ryan still has a neck moviegoers would want to look at.

(cwyman@citypaper.net)