Why EVERY woman moans about the size of her breasts . . . even the ones I’ve spent my life envying

The late NORA EPHRON was the razor-sharp writer behind When Harry Met Sally. Now the Mail’s serialising a joyous collection of her wittiest — and wisest — work

hand- chromed until it shone, dazzled, reflected the image of anyone who looked into it, anyone usually being Buster polishing it or the petrol station attendants he constantly asked to check the oil in order for them to be overwhelmed by the sparkle on the valves.

We would ride around town, the two of us seated to the left of the steering wheel. I would shift gears. It was nice.

There was necking. Terrific necking. I loved it, really, but no further than necking, please don’t, please, because there I was, absolutely terrified of the general implications of going-a-step-further with a near-dummy and also terrified of his finding out there was next to nothing there (which he knew, of course; he wasn’t that dumb).

I broke up with him at one point. I think we were apart for about two weeks. At the end of that time, I drove down to a golf tournament Buster was playing in and presented myself back to him on the green of the 18th hole. It was all very dramatic.

That night we went to a drive-in and I let him get his hand under my protuberances and onto my breasts. He really didn’t seem to mind at all. ‘Do YOU want to marry my son?’ the woman asked me. ‘Yes,’ I said. I was 19 years old, a virgin, going with this woman’s son, this big strange woman who had this total fool of a son whom for one moment one December in New Hampshire I said — as much out of politeness as anything else — that I wanted to marry.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Now, here’s what you do. Always make sure you’re on top of him so you won’t seem so small. My bust is very large, you see, so I always lie on my back to make it lo look smaller, but you’ll have to be on to top o most of the time.’ I nodded. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I have a book for you to read,’ she w went on. ‘Take it with you when you leave. Keep it.’ She went to the bookshelf, found it, and gave it to me. It was a book on frigidity. ‘Thank you,’ I said. That is a true story. Everything in this article is a true story, but I feel I have to point out that that story in particular is true. It happened on December 30, 1960. I think about it often.

When it happened, I naturally assumed that the woman’s son, my boyfriend, was responsible.

I invented a scenario where he’d had a little heart-to-heart with his mother and had confessed that his only objection to me was that my breasts were small; his mother then took it upon herself to help out.

Now I think I was wrong about the incident. The mother was acting on her own, I think: that was her way of being cruel and competitive under the guise of being helpful and maternal.

You have small breasts, she was saying; therefore you will never make him as happy as I have.

or you have small breasts; therefore you will doubtless have sexual problems. or you have small breasts; therefore you are less woman than I am.

SHE was, as it happens, only the first of what seems to me to be a never- ending string of women who have made competitive remarks to me about breast size. ‘I would love to wear a dress like that,’ my friend Emily says to me, ‘but my bust is too big.’ Like that.

Why do women say these things to me? Do I attract these remarks the way other women attract married men or alcoholics or homosexuals?

This summer, for example. I am at a party in East Hampton and I am introduced to a woman from Washington. She is a minor celebrity, very pretty and Southern and blonde and outspoken, and I am flattered because she has read something I have written.

We are talking animatedly, we have been talking no more than five minutes, when a man comes up to join us.

‘Look at the two of us,’ the woman says to the man, indicating me and her. ‘The two of us together couldn’t fill an A-cup.’

Why does she say that? It isn’t even true, dammit, so why? Is she even more addled than I am on this subject?

Does she honestly believe there is something wrong with her size breasts, which, it seems to me, now that I look hard at them, are just right?

Do I unconsciously bring out competitiveness in women? In that form? What did I do to deserve it?

As for men. There were men who minded and let me know they minded.

There were men who did not mind. In any case, I always minded.

And even now, now that I have been countlessly reassured that my figure is a good one, now that I am grown-up enough to understand that most of my feelings have very little to do with the reality of my shape, I am nonetheless obsessed by breasts. I cannot help it.

I grew up in the terrible Fifties — with rigid stereotypical sex roles, the insistence that men be men and dress like men and women be women and dress like women, the intolerance of androgyny — and I cannot shake it, cannot shake my feelings of inadequacy.

Well, that time is gone, right? All those exaggerated examples of breast worship are gone, right? Those women were freaks, right?

I know all that. And yet here I am, stuck with the psychological remains of it all, stuck with my own peculiar version of breast worship.

You probably think I am crazy to go on like this: here I have set out