Don't you just detest your hair? Endless hours under the dryer. A fortune on highlights. And as for stray whiskers! NORA EPHRON spent a lifetime wrestling with her rollers

In the final part of our gloriously uplifting series celebrating the wit and wisdom of Hollywood screenwriter Nora Ephron, who died last week, she turns her attention to the daily battles women wage in a bid to stay looking youthful …
For weeks now, I have been trying to write about maintenance, but it hasn’t been easy, and for a simple reason: maintenance takes up so much of my life that I barely have time to sit down at the computer.
There are two types of maintenance, of course. There’s Status Quo Maintenance — the things you have to do daily, or weekly, or monthly, just to stay more or less even.

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High maintenance: Nora Ephron believed that blow drys are much better for you than therapy

And then there’s the maintenance you have to do monthly, or yearly, or every couple of years or so — maintenance I think of as Pathetic Attempts to Turn Back the Clock.
Into this category fall such things as facelifts, liposuction, Botox, major dental work, and Removal of Unsightly Things — of varicose veins, for instance, and skin tags, and those irritating little red spots that crop up on your torso after a certain age.
I’m not going to discuss such issues here. For now, I’m concentrating only on the routine, everyday things required just to keep you from looking like someone who no longer cares.
We begin, I’m sorry to say, with hair. I’m sorry to say it, because the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair any more is the secret upside  of death.