nora ephron essays

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, her own story: a nora ephron appreciation.

Nora Ephron has been portrayed on screen by Diane Keaton , Sandra Dee , Meryl Streep , and Streep’s daughter, Grace Gummer . And that’s just the characters based on her life; her wit and insight are reflected in dozens of other characters she created as well.  

Nora’s writer mother Phoebe taught her that “everything is copy.” Even as she was dying, she ordered Nora to take notes. All four Ephron daughters became writers, but Nora, named for the door-slamming heroine of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House , most of all mined her own life and those around her for material. She is best remembered as the writer and/or director of four of the most successful romantic comedies of all time: “ When Harry Met Sally... ” (1989), “ Sleepless in Seattle ” (1993), “You’ve Got Mail” (1998), and “ Julie and Julia " (2009). The glossy charm of those films, and, let’s face it, their marginalization as “chick flicks,” makes it easy to overlook just how smart they are. For decades, no other romantic comedies have come close in quality or influence, despite the best efforts of various adorkable Jessicas and Jennifers confronting cutely contrived misunderstandings with Judy Greer as the quirky best friend. 

Nora was the oldest daughter of screenwriters Henry and Phoebe Ephron (their story is told in Henry’s memoir, We Thought We Could Do Anything ). They were New York City playwrights lured west to adapt established works like “Carousel” and “Daddy Long Legs” for Hollywood. Their four daughters grew up in Beverly Hills while the Ephrons worked on films like “Desk Set,” starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn , “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” with Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe and “Captain Newman, M.D.,” with Gregory Peck and Tony Curtis . Phoebe wrote to Nora at camp describing the scene outside her office on the studio lot: a special effects crew creating the parting of the Red Sea for “The Ten Commandments,” using blue Jell-O. 

The Ephrons often entertained their friends, mostly other New York writers, and Nora grew up listening to complicated, challenging, witty—sometimes relentlessly witty—people. She remembered Dorothy Parker playing word games at her parents’ parties.  Nora dreamed of being the Parker-esque queen of a new Algonquin Roundtable: “The only lady at the table. The woman who made her living by her wit.”

The Ephrons did not hesitate to use each other's lives as material. Even Nora’s son, Jacob Bernstein, produced a superb documentary about his mother, which is of course titled "Everything is Copy." It tells the story of Nora’s sister Delia putting her head through the bannister rails in their house, so that the fire department had to come and get her out. The Ephrons made that into an incident in a James Stewart film they wrote called “The Jackpot.” “My parents just took it and recycled it, just like that,” Nora says in the film. Later, Nora’s letters home from college inspired her parents to write a successful play called “Take Her, She’s Mine,” which became a movie starring Sandra Dee as a free-spirited (for 1963) daughter and James Stewart as the lawyer father who tries to keep her out of trouble.

Phoebe and Henry were not the kind of parents who came to their children’s school events or comforted them reassuringly. Phoebe would respond to her daughters’ stories of heartbreak or disappointment by telling them it was all material for them to write about. She had a biting humor, sometimes at her daughters’ expense. But the Ephrons taught their daughters how to tell stories, especially their own stories. 

After college, Nora went to New York to work as a “mail girl” for Time magazine. News magazines of that era did not allow women to write bylined articles; the most they could expect was to be researchers for the male journalists. The fictionalized but fact-based Amazon series “Good Girls Revolt” depicts the experiences of the women who fought this system, and it includes a character named Nora Ephron, played by Grace Gummer. 

Nora was in the right time and place when two great upheavals came together in the 1970’s: the feminist movement and the arrival of “new journalism”—vital, opinionated, very personal writing that powered popular and influential magazines like Clay Felker’s New York Magazine . This was the perfect place for her distinctive, confiding voice. Her essays were deceptively self-deprecatory—her first collection was called Wallflower at the Orgy and one of her best-known pieces describes her insecurity about having small breasts. But Nora’s columns, especially the series about women collected in Crazy Salad and the series about media in Scribble Scribble , are fierce, confident, devastating takedowns of those she found pretentious, hypocritical, or smug, including her former boss at the New York Post and the President’s daughter, whom she described as “a chocolate-covered spider.”  

By 1976, Nora had already divorced the first of her three writer husbands and it was around this time she fell in love with another media superstar, Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein . In “Everything is Copy,” he described the night they met: “We had this amazing conversation.” They got married and she moved to Washington.  

When she was pregnant with their second child, she discovered he was unfaithful. She packed up and moved back to New York. As director Mike Nichols says in “Everything is Copy,” she cried for six months before taking her mother’s advice and writing a thinly disguised novel about it, the scathingly funny Heartburn . “In writing it funny, she won,” says Nichols, who then directed the 1986 movie version, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson . Streep called the book Nora’s “central act of resilience.”  

“She wrote herself out of trouble,” says her agent, Bryan Lourd. That was economic trouble as well as heartache. Although she had never intended to become a screenwriter like her parents, she found that it provided more flexibility for a single mother than being a journalist. So she adapted Heartburn for the screen and co-wrote 1983's “ Silkwood ,” also starring Streep as the Kerr-McGee employee turned activist.

Those who dismiss Nora’s work as lightweight because it is often light-hearted overlook its singularly radical and unapologetically female point of view. The moment in "Everything is Copy" that best illuminates her significance as a filmmaker is when Streep recalls Nichols asking Nora to provide more perspective on the husband’s point of view. But Streep understood that “this is about the person who got hit by the bus. It’s not about the bus.” Nora was saying that we have already seen a lot of movies from the perspective of the man; this one is the woman’s story. Indeed, it is the ability to control the point of view that was most important to Nora as a writer and director. In the novel version of Heartburn , she anticipated and answered questions about why she would tell the world something so personal and humiliating.

Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.

Nora loved the control of being a director and paid attention to the smallest of details.  For “Sleepless in Seattle,” she had a door flown across country so that the characters who had not yet met would be literally opening the same door, sending the audience a subliminal signal about their rightness for each other. She said that directing a movie meant that all day people asked her to decide things—she found it very satisfying to give them answers.

"Everything is Copy" shows a Newsday headline for a story about Nora: “She tells the world things that maybe she shouldn’t, but aren’t you glad she did?” Nora was her own best copy, and it is a treat to see topics and opinions from her personal essays show up in her films. In "When Harry Met Sally...," Sally’s “high maintenance” style of ordering in a restaurant is based on Nora, and the sexual fantasy she confides to Harry as they walk through Central Park in autumn is one Nora discussed for its possible anti-feminist implications in Crazy Salad . In “Sleepless in Seattle,” Nora pays loving tribute to a movie she saw with her mother, “An Affair to Remember.” (After they saw the movie, Phoebe introduced Nora to its star, Cary Grant .) In “Julie and Julia,” the loving, devoted relationship between Julia Child and her husband Paul is based in part on Nora’s very happy third marriage.

One of Nora’s most underrated films is perhaps her most personal, 1992's “ This Is My Life ,” based on the book by Meg Wolitzer , with Julie Kavner as a single mother trying to make it as a stand-up comic.  Lena Dunham told the New Yorker that this film, Nora's directorial debut, made her want to be a filmmaker.  

On each viewing, a new joke or angle revealed itself to me and its world became richer. I loved Samantha Mathis ’ surly teen, Gaby Hoffmann ’s quippy innocent, and especially Julie Kavner’s Dot, their single mother, a standup comedian hellbent on self-actualizing despite, or maybe because of, these daughters. But what I really loved was the person orchestrating the whole thing. The costumes, perfectly low-rent polka-dotted blazers and grungy winter hats. The music, a mixture of vaudevillian bounce and Carly Simon ’s voice that somehow made the city seem more real than if car horns scored the film. The camerawork, a single gliding shot that followed each family member into her bedroom as she settled into a new apartment in a less than desirable Manhattan neighborhood. I loved whoever was making these actresses comfortable enough to express the minutiae of being a human woman onscreen.

At first, the conflict in the story comes from the character’s struggles to support her children. But then, as she becomes successful, the conflicts are central to Nora both as Phoebe’s daughter and as her sons’ mother: How can a mother pursue her passion and talent, knowing she may neglect the needs of her children? And should her children’s confidences and problems be copy for her stand-up routine?  

In one scene, Kavner’s character Dottie talks to her agent:

Dottie Ingels: I spend 16 years doing nothing but thinking about them and now I spend three months thinking about myself and I feel like I’ve murdered them. Arnold Moss: You had to travel. It’s part of your work. Kids are happy when their mother’s happy. Dottie Ingels: No they’re not. Everyone says that, but it’s not true. Kids are happy if you’re there. You give kids a choice: your mother in the next room on the verge of suicide versus your mother in Hawaii in ecstasy, they choose suicide in the next room. Believe me.

2000's “ Hanging Up ” is based on Delia Ephron ’s 1995 book about her father’s death. Delia and Nora wrote the script, and Delia speaks frankly in "Everything is Copy" about the arguments they had while they were working together. The movie is a mess, of more interest for what it reveals about Ephron family dynamics than for its quality. The character based on Nora is played by Diane Keaton, who also directed. In his review, Roger Ebert wrote: “It is so blond and brittle, so pumped up with cheerful chatter and quality time, so relentless in the way it wants to be bright about sisterhood and death, that you want to stick a star on its forehead and send it home with a fever.” Tellingly, the Keaton/Nora character in the film is accused by her sister of appropriating her emotions for public display.  

My favorite “everything is copy” example in Nora’s films is from her most overlooked movie, the very charming and funny “My Blue Heaven" (1990). It stars Steve Martin as a former mobster in the witness protection program and Rick Moranis as the FBI agent assigned to take care of him as he prepares to testify against the head of the crime syndicate. The single mom prosecutor played by Joan Cusack reflects some of Nora’s experiences. But it isn’t the Ephrons who are copy here. By this time, Nora was very happily married to her third husband, writer Nicholas Pileggi , whose book about former mobster Henry Hill was the basis for the brilliant Martin Scorsese crime drama “ Goodfellas .” Clearly, as her husband was writing about Hill, Nora was thinking that putting a goodfella into witness protection could be a funny story.  

Nora’s sons are now writers, too, both reporters, telling other people’s stories. But in writing about her death for the New York Times and telling Nora’s story in “Everything is Copy,” Jacob Bernstein tells his own as well. We see him talking to his father about the divorce and the many-year fight that followed, which included a negotiation for joint custody in exchange for allowing Nora to make the movie “ Heartburn .” The agreement filed with the court even included a clause ensuring that Bernstein would be portrayed as a good father in the film, so the film did not just reflect her life; it was shaped by it. In "Everything is Copy," a s Jacob mulls his grandmother’s famous phrase, and the private illness of his usually open-book mother, another generation of family writers expresses how their personal experiences can be illuminating for us, too. 

Nell Minow is the Contributing Editor at RogerEbert.com.

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‘I Remember Nothing’: Nora Ephron’s hilarious essays

Nora Ephron has done it all. The film director, producer, screenwriter, journalist and blogger is also an author, and her new book — “I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections” — is a collection of short, funny essays about everything from aging and divorce to journalism and technology. In this excerpted essay, Ephron directs her razor-sharp wit toward e-mail.

The six stages of e-mail

Stage one: Infatuation I just got e-mail! I can’t believe it! It’s so great! Here’s my handle. Write me. Who said letter-writing was dead? Were they ever wrong. I’m writing letters like crazy for the first time in years. I come home and ignore all my loved ones and go straight to the com­puter to make contact with total strangers. And how great is AOL? It’s so easy. It’s so friendly. It’s a community. Wheeeee! I’ve got mail!

Stage two: Clarification Okay, I’m starting to understand — e-mail isn’t letter-writing at all, it’s something else entirely. It was just invented, it was just born, and overnight it turns out to have a form and a set of rules and a language all its own. Not since the printing press. Not since television. It’s revolutionary. It’s life-altering. It’s shorthand. Cut to the chase. Get to the point. It saves so much time. It takes five seconds to accomplish in an e-mail something that takes five minutes on the telephone. The phone requires you to converse, to say things like hello and good-bye, to pretend to some semblance of interest in the person on the other end of the line. Worst of all, the phone occasionally forces you to make actual plans with the people you talk to — to suggest lunch or dinner — even if you have no desire whatsoever to see them. No danger of that with e-mail. E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know.

Stage three: Confusion I have done nothing to deserve any of this: Viagra!!!!! Best Web source for Vioxx. Spend a week in Cancún. Have a rich beautiful lawn. Astrid would like to be added as one of your friends. XXXXXXXVideos. Add three inches to the length of your penis. The Demo­cratic National Committee needs you. Virus Alert. FW: This will make you laugh. FW: This is funny. FW: This is hilarious. FW: Grapes and raisins toxic for dogs. FW: Gabriel García Márquez’s Final Farewell. FW: Kurt Vonnegut’s Commencement Address. FW: The Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. AOL Member: We value your opinion. A message from Barack Obama. Find low mortgage payments, Nora. Nora, it’s your time to shine. Need to fight off bills, Nora? Yvette would like to be added as one of your friends. You have failed to establish a full connection to AOL.

Stage four: Disenchantment Help! I’m drowning. I have 112 unanswered e-mails. I’m a writer — imagine how many unanswered e-mails I would have if I had a real job. Imagine how much writ­ing I could do if I didn’t have to answer all this e-mail. My eyes are dim. My wrist hurts. I can’t focus. Every time I start to write something, the e-mail icon starts bobbing up and down and I’m compelled to check whether anything good or interesting has arrived. It hasn’t. Still, it might, any second now. And yes, it’s true — I can do in a few seconds with e-mail what would take much longer on the phone, but most of my e-mails are from people who don’t have my phone number and would never call me in the first place. In the brief time it took me to write this paragraph, three more e-mails arrived. Now I have 115 unanswered e-mails. Strike that: 116. Glub glub glub glub glub.

Stage five: Accommodation Yes. No. Can’t. No way. Maybe. Doubtful. Sorry. So sorry. Thanks. No thanks. Out of town. OOT. Try me in a month. Try me in the fall. Try me in a year. [email protected] can now be reached at [email protected].

Stage six: Death Call me.

Excerpted with permission from “I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections” by Nora Ephron (Knopf, 2010).

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Nora ephron, humorist, screenwriter and director.

Listen to this achiever on What It Takes

What It Takes is an audio podcast produced by the American Academy of Achievement featuring intimate, revealing conversations with influential leaders in the diverse fields of endeavor: public service, science and exploration, sports, technology, business, arts and humanities, and justice.

For years, I just wrote scripts that didn’t get made. I got paid for them, but I thought, ‘Am I ever going to get a movie made?’

Nora Ephron was born in New York City and lived, for the first four years of her life, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood that figures prominently in her writing. She was the first of four daughters of Henry and Phoebe Ephron, writers who moved to Los Angeles when Nora was three to work in the film industry. Although the Ephrons enjoyed success in Hollywood, young Nora did not feel at home in the Southern California of the 1950s and longed to return to New York, which she always regarded as her real home.

After graduating from Wellesley College in 1962 with a degree in journalism, she served briefly as a White House intern during the administration of John F. Kennedy. Returning to New York at last, she found work in the mailroom at Newsweek magazine and was soon promoted to researcher. When New York City’s newspapers suspended publication during a strike by the International Typographical Union, Nora Ephron and some of her friends, including the young Calvin Trillin , put out their own satirical newspaper. Ephron’s parodies of New York Post columnists caught the eye of the Post ‘s publisher, Dorothy Schiff. When the strike was over, Schiff hired Ephron as a reporter. The 1960s were a lively time for journalism in New York, and Dorothy Schiff’s Post , a liberal-leaning afternoon tabloid, offered Ephron a free hand to explore her favorite city from top to bottom.

While working at the Post , Nora Ephron also began writing occasional essays for publications such as New York , Esquire and The New York Times Sunday Magazine . Her work as a reporter won acclaim as part of the “New Journalism” movement of the 1960s, in which the author’s personal voice became part of the story. Her humorous 1972 essay, “A Few Words About Breasts,” made her name as an essayist. As a regular columnist for Esquire , she became one of America’s best-known humorists. Her essays, often focusing on sex, food, and New York City, were collected in a series of bestselling volumes, Wallflower at the Orgy , Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble .

An early marriage to humorist Dan Greenburg ended in divorce, and Ephron married investigative reporter Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame. After the birth of their first child, Ephron curtailed her activities as a journalist and devoted more of her time to screenwriting, scripting occasional television episodes and selling a number of screenplays that were never produced. Midway through Ephron’s second pregnancy, her marriage to Carl Bernstein ended, and she found herself alone with two small boys to raise. Her screenplay for the film Silkwood (1983), based on the life of an anti-nuclear activist who met a violent end, was made into a successful film by famed director Mike Nichols, starring actress Meryl Streep.

The same year, Ephron published a comic novel, Heartburn , clearly based on the marriage to Bernstein and its painful dissolution. A film adaptation, starring Streep and Jack Nicholson, soon appeared, directed by Mike Nichols from a script by Ephron. With two high-profile screenplays to her credit, Ephron became one of the most sought-after writers in the business. Her personal life took a happy turn in 1987, when she married author and journalist Nicholas Pileggi, best known for his true-crime stories, including two that formed the basis for films by director Martin Scorsese , GoodFellas and Casino .

Nora Ephron enjoyed her greatest success yet with When Harry Met Sally (1989), a romantic comedy directed by Rob Reiner, starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan. The film struck an instant chord with audiences and became an international hit. Ephron had seen her parents’ writing careers falter in their 50s, as they both fell prey to alcohol and the fickle fashions of Hollywood.

Ephron contemplated a transition to directing, in part to protect her own writing career in an industry still largely inhospitable to films by or about women. Unfortunately, her directing debut, This Is My Life , about the struggles of a single mother working as a stand-up comic, was a box office disappointment. Ephron knew her future as a director would stand or fall with her next assignment.

Sleepless in Seattle (1993) was co-written by Nora Ephron and her younger sister, Delia. Director Nora cast When  Harry Met Sally star Meg Ryan, teaming her with Tom Hanks. The resulting film was an enormous success, and Ephron was now established as Hollywood’s foremost creator of romantic comedies. A follow-up film, Mixed Nuts , was a commercial disappointment, but Michael , starring John Travolta as an angel, enjoyed solid success at the box office. In You’ve Got Mail (1998), Ephron re-united Sleepless stars Hanks and Ryan in a contemporary variation on the classic comedy The Shop Around the Corner . With You’ve Got Mail , the team of Ephron, Ryan and Hanks scored another huge success; Ephron’s film also served as a love letter to her beloved Upper West Side.

In the following years, Nora Ephron pursued a wide variety of projects. She made an unexpected foray into writing for the stage with her 2002 play Imaginary Friends , based on the turbulent rivalry of authors Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy. She took another unusual tack with an offbeat big-screen adaptation of the 1960s television series Bewitched , starring Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell. Her 2006 collection of essays, I Feel Bad Abut My Neck: And Other Reflections on Being a Woman , immediately shot to number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

In her film Julie and Julia , she returned to a favorite subject — food — by telling the parallel stories of famed food writer Julia Child and a contemporary Manhattan woman who sets out to cook her way through every recipe in Childs’s classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking . The 2009 film starred Ephron’s friend and previous collaborator Meryl Streep as Julia Child. In addition to her books, plays and movies, Ephron wrote a regular blog for the online news site The Huffington Post . Her 2010 collection of essays, I Remember Nothing , took a humorous look at the aging process and other topics.

Nora Ephron was one of a handful of successful women film directors working in Hollywood, and one whose films consistently featured women in strong, decisive roles. She lived to see all three of her younger sisters —Delia, Amy and Hallie —build successful writing careers. Nora Ephron died in Manhattan, from complications of leukemia, at the age of 71.

Nora Ephron achieved international success as a director and writer of feature films, a field that had been effectively closed to women for over half a century. Her earlier work as a journalist and essayist had already won her a reputation for sharp-eyed social observation and sharp-tongued humor. It also introduced a distinctive approach to her favorite subjects: New York City, food, and the baffling ways of men and women in love.

She was pregnant with her second child when her husband left her, and she found herself at home with two babies to take care of while trying to break into screenwriting. In 1983, her script for the film Silkwood was nominated for an Oscar, and her novel Heartburn , a comic fictionalization of the end of her marriage, became a bestseller. Ephron’s original screenplay, When Harry Met Sally , solidified her reputation as a screenwriter, but she wanted something more. She soon made her name as a director with Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail , runaway successes that established her as Hollywood’s premier creator of modern romantic comedies. Her 2009 film Julie and Julia recounts the life of the author and television personality Julia Child, who introduced Americans to French cooking in the 1960s.

Ephron’s 2006 book of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman , topped the New York Times hardcover bestseller list for over nine months. Although her subject was the aging process, her approach to the human condition was unchanged. “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you,” she said. “But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh.”

You’ve written that you learned from your parents’ friends that at the age of 50, screenwriters’ careers sometimes nose-dive. Was that what drew you to directing, the need to extend or protect your career as a screenwriter?

Nora Ephron: I think it was two things. It wasn’t just that I wanted to go on writing, but I wanted to write about things that were hard to attach directors to, if you wanted to write about women in any way.

Ninety percent of the men directing movies have no interest in women in any real way, except as girlfriends or wives. They don’t really want to make movies about them, and they don’t. So the arduous task of getting someone to commit to something that had anything to do with my life was very frustrating. Then, when I did When Harry Met Sally with Rob Reiner, I wrote that script, and I thought, “Well, I don’t really want to direct, but if I did direct, this would be a good movie to start with, because there aren’t a lot of people in it, and there aren’t a lot of people in any of the scenes, and it wouldn’t be that complicated shooting it,” and all of that. But then Rob did it, and he was so brilliant. He did such a brilliant job. He changed the script. He made it so much better than it was, and so I thought, “Well, I guess if I get to work with the Robs of the world, why direct?” And then my next movie I did with someone else who didn’t make the script better. So, at about that time, I thought maybe I should think about directing.

If I became a director, I could at least get my own movies made, my own scripts made, and the sense that I would be interested in subjects that men might not be interested in. It’s very hard to get people to direct your movies if you are a screenwriter. First, you have to write the script. That’s almost the easy part.

Speaking of When Harry Met Sally , you’ve used Meg Ryan in several films to great effect. What was it about her as an actress that kept you coming back to her for those roles?

Nora Ephron: Well, Meg can do everything. Meg is both funny and smart, and you rarely get that in one person. She’s a brilliantly gifted actress. She really is.

That script also got an Oscar nomination and is famous for a scene involving a fake orgasm. Did that come off as you wrote it?

Nora Ephron: I’d been working on this script with Rob Reiner, and Rob had told me all this stuff about guys, right? And how horrible they are and how unwilling they are to commit in any way, even to the bed of the person they’ve just had sex with for the rest of the night. So one day, we were sitting around, and Rob said, “You know, we’ve told you all this stuff about guys.   Now you tell us anything about women that we don’t know,” and it was like, “I dare you, I dare you. You will never be able to tell me anything about women I don’t know, but try.” So I said, “Well, women fake orgasms,” and he said, “Not with me.”   So I said, “Yes, with you,” and he said, “No, no, no.”   I said, “Yes, yes, yes.”   Well, he went completely crazy.   He really did.   I mean, he did a total Meathead moment and went thundering out to the bullpen at Castle Rock Pictures, where all the women were, and said, “Get in here,” and they call came in.    He said, “Is it true that women fake orgasms?” And this group of six completely terrified assistants all looked at him and went like this.   It was just an amazing moment.

So we took that fact and put that into a scene. It was a very simple scene where Sally tells Harry that, and Harry says, “Not with me,” and she says, “Yes, with you,” and he says, “I don’t believe it,” and she says, “You better believe it.” It was very simple.

We had a read-through, and Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan read the script, and at the end of the read-through, Meg said, “You know, I think this scene would be much funnier if it took place in a restaurant,” and Rob said, “That’s a great idea.   Let’s do it in a restaurant,” and then Meg said, “And then I think at the end of the scene, she should have an orgasm,” and Rob said, “Well, that’s a really good idea,” and Billy Crystal said, “And one of the customers can say: I’ll have what she’s having,” and Rob said, “And I know just the actor to play that part: my mother.” Now, you know, I had started out in the movie business thinking, “Oh please don’t let them change my lines. Please don’t let them do anything to me.” And you know, you hear an idea like that, and you think, “I am so lucky to be working with these people.”   Thank God people believe in collaboration.   Of course, I get all the credit for that line which I had — well, I’d like to think I had something to do with it, because if I hadn’t broken the news about faking orgasms, there might be millions of men still walking around the earth not knowing it, and they do know it because of that movie.

It was a brilliant performance by Meg Ryan as well.

Nora Ephron: It was, wasn’t it? She’s great.

You’ve said that despite the great success of When Harry Met Sally , you had a tough time getting financing for your first directorial effort.

Nora Ephron: It wasn’t a really commercial movie.   It would have been more commercial had it had a more commercial cast, but I didn’t have a very commercial cast. In fact, I had Bette Midler who wanted to do it, and Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney would not let her out of her contract to do it.   I think the movie would have done better if Bette had been in it. I loved Julie Kavner in it, but I begged Jeffrey Katzenberg to let (Bette Midler) out of her contract, or for him to make it, and he simply had no interest in the subject matter of that movie and told me so.   He had no interest in what it was about, which was balancing a career and work.   It was about a woman stand-up comic, who had two children.   It’s a very funny script, and a good script, and Jeffrey isn’t really interested in women.   His wife is a housewife.   He just wasn’t there, and it was heartbreaking to me. I went through — it seemed like forever — trying to get it made, and then suddenly one day a guy named Joe Roth at Fox said, “I’ll make this movie with Julie Kavner,” and he did it.

It was a wonderful movie.

Nora Ephron: Thank you.

The next year came Sleepless in Seattle . That was a great success. How did you come to write Sleepless in Seattle ?

Nora Ephron: Sleepless was a script that had been written by three or four other writers before me, and it never really worked, but it had this amazing ending on the top of the Empire State Building that just worked, no matter what came before it. It’s kind of amazing, because the characters were sort of gloopy and unfunny, and yet you got to the end and you went, “Wow, this is amazing!” And I needed the money.

I had done my first movie, This Is My Life , which I had done for scale, which is not very much money, and I was completely out of dough, and my agent said, “Oh gee, here’s a rewrite,” and it’s supposed to happen. It had a director. It had casting attached to it, and not Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, and so I read it, and I thought, “Oh, I can fix this. I can make this better.” So I did a rewrite on it, and basically made it into a comedy, or made it into — not a comedy, but a movie that had laughs in it, which it didn’t at all. And suddenly, it was a “go” picture, and the director who had been attached to it — who had no interest in making a comedy, I guess — bowed out of it. He was gone, and the actors were gone, because they weren’t really funny, and it was suddenly a script that a lot of people wanted to be in.

It wasn’t like I thought, “I have to direct this.”   In fact, I thought, “Well, this isn’t really good enough yet,” and they kept saying, “Don’t you want to direct this?” and I kept saying, “But it’s not ready to be directed.   I’ve got to do another rewrite on it.”   I only worked on it three weeks.   “No, no.   It’s fine.   Do anything you want to.”   I said, “Well, I’ve got to bring Delia, my sister, in on it, because I need a lot of help if I’m going to direct it.”   “Bring Delia in. That’s great!” Delia brought a huge number of hilarious things to it, and suddenly — I have never had anything like it happen.   It was instant.   It was like, I think I gave them the script — the first pass in March — and we were scouting in Seattle in early June, and we were shooting in August.   It was unbelievable.

Looking back, it seems like an effortless vehicle. What was it like to direct it?

Nora Ephron: I have no idea what it was like to direct it, because all of my experiences as a director are filtered through food, and the food was great in Seattle.   That’s all I can tell you, and the sun was shining all the time, because it was summertime in Seattle. We had to — actually, of course — have some rain in the movie, and we had to bring in water trucks, and everyone got really angry at us because there was a drought, and we were wasting water, making rain in the movie. It was this movie where you just thought, “I wonder if this is going to work? Who knows?”   You know, I had no idea.

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3 great essays by nora ephron.

A Few Words about Breasts - I was boyish. I wanted desperately not to be that way, not to be a mixture of both things, but instead just one, a girl. As soft and as pink as a nursery. And nothing would do that for me, I felt, but breasts..

The Graduate - It was gritty and glamorous and everything I’d been longing for—to begin my life in New York as a journalist…

On Maintenance - Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won’t have to hide behind a stack of canned food…

About The Electric Typewriter We search the net to bring you the best nonfiction, articles, essays and journalism

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Excerpt: 'I Feel Bad About My Neck'

Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron, hiding from the inevitable. Elena Seibert Photography hide caption

Nora Ephron, hiding from the inevitable.

What I Wish I'd Known

People have only one way to be.

Buy, don't rent.

Never marry a man you wouldn't want to be divorced from.

Don't cover a couch with anything that isn't more or less beige.

Don't buy anything that is 100 percent wool even if it seems to be very soft and not particularly itchy when you try it on in the store.

You can't be friends with people who call after 11 p.m.

Block everyone on your instant mail.

The world's greatest babysitter burns out after two and a half years.

You never know.

The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money.

The plane is not going to crash.

Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five.

At the age of fifty-five you will get a saggy roll just above your waist even if you are painfully thin.

This saggy roll just above your waist will be especially visible from the back and will force you to reevaluate half the clothes in your closet, especially the white shirts.

Write everything down.

Keep a journal.

Take more pictures.

The empty nest is underrated.

You can order more than one dessert.

You can't own too many black turtleneck sweaters.

If the shoe doesn't fit in the shoe store, it's never going to fit.

When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.

Back up your files.

Overinsure everything.

Whenever someone says the words "Our friendship is more important than this," watch out, because it almost never is.

There's no point in making piecrust from scratch.

The reason you're waking up in the middle of the night is the second glass of wine.

The minute you decide to get divorced, go see a lawyer and file the papers.

Never let them know.

If only one third of your clothes are mistakes, you're ahead of the game.

If friends ask you to be their child's guardian in case they die in a plane crash, you can say no.

There are no secrets.

Excerpted from I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron Copyright © 2006 by Nora Ephron. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Three Rules for Middle-Age Happiness

Gather friends and feed them, laugh in the face of calamity, and cut out all the things––people, jobs, body parts––that no longer serve you.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       

“The only thing a uterus is good for after a certain point is causing pain and killing you. Why are we even talking about this?” Nora jams a fork into her chopped chicken salad, the one she insisted I order as well. “If your doctor says it needs to come out, yank it out.” Nora speaks her mind the way others breathe: an involuntary reflex, not a choice. (Obviously, all dialogue here, including my own, is recorded from the distortion field of memory.)

“But the uterus …” I say, spearing a slice of egg. “It’s so …”

“Symbolic?”

“Yes. Don’t roll your eyes.”

“I’m not rolling my eyes.” She leans in. “I’m trying to get you to face a, well, it’s not even a hard truth. It’s an easy one. Promise me the minute you leave this lunch you’ll pick up the phone and schedule the hysterectomy today. Not tomorrow. Today .”

“Why the rush?”

“Why the hesitation?” Nora has leukemia. She knows this. I do not.

Ten years earlier, Nora had cold-called my home, annoyed that she’d had to get my number through a friend. Throughout her life, if you dialed 411 and asked for her home number, you’d get it. “Why would you ever not be listed?” she’d said. “What if someone needs to get in touch with you?” But first she said, “Hi, Deb, this is Nora Ephron. I loved your memoir, and I’d like to take you out to lunch.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “And I’m Joan of Arc.” I assumed it was a friend, mimicking her voice. Nora was my superhero. Screenwriter, director, novelist, humorist, essayist, journalist—Nora did all the things I wanted to do but better, faster, stronger. I saw Heartburn three times when it first came out; When Harry Met Sally , too many times to count.

“No, Deb. This is Nora. And I’d like to invite you to lunch.”

I froze. It was her. Nora effing Ephron. On the other end of my phone. So what does one say to the woman whose work you’ve admired your entire life? For starters, not this: “Ummmm …”

“Are you still there?” said Nora.

A long, uncomfortable pause. “Sorry. Lunch. Yes!”

I’d been clutching a roll of bubble wrap when she called, staring at a wall of family photos that needed to come down. Our dark 1.5-bedroom was located over a parking garage that overheated every summer, rendering the kitchen tiles too hot for bare feet. Its windows framed the last stop of the M79 bus route. Buses idled there 24/7, blasting a toxic cloud of metaphor into the master bedroom.

Moving boxes were everywhere. My husband and I were eight years into our marriage, six years into parenthood, and five days away from seeing whether more light, air, and space could keep our marriage from collapsing. Our new living room, bright and fume-free, had an oblique view of the Twin Towers. Until it didn’t.

Now, a decade later, Nora’s my go-to person on every topic: Couches, she tells me, should be white; tables, round; emails, short; lunches, long. “You don’t need it anymore,” she says, still harping on about my uterus. “It served you well, but that part of your life is over.”

She’s right. I’m 45, I have three children––two teenagers and a preschooler––and I’m not planning on having any more. And yet: Who am I without my uterus?

“How great is this chicken salad?” says Nora.

“Delicious.”

Our lunches have become a monthly fixture, to which Nora often arrives bearing gifts with careful instructions for their use: Dr. Hauschka’s lemon oil (“Dump at least half a bottle in the bath water. Don’t skimp. If you like it, I’ll get you more”); a black cardigan from Zara (“I bought five of them, they were so cheap. You can wear it on your book tour. Look, the buttons look just like a Chanel”); a silver picture frame (“Black-and-white photos only. Color won’t work”).

“Won’t I feel like less of a woman without a uterus?” I ask.

“Oh, please.” Nora rolls her eyes again. “Would you rather not have a uterus or be dead? They go in with robots now. You’ll barely have a scar.  So what is this adeno … How do you pronounce the thing you have?”

“Adenomyosis,” I say, Googling it on my phone to make sure I get the definition right: A chronic condition in which the lining of the uterus breaks through the muscle wall, causing extensive bleeding, increased risk of anemia, heavy cramping, and severe bloating.

“Sounds delightful. I see now why you’d want to keep it.”

I laugh. Then I sigh. I’ve been putting up with this disease for 16 years because, like most women who get adenomyosis (or endometriosis, its equally wily cousin), I had no idea I had it. “How are your periods?” my gynecologist would ask every year, and every year I would answer, “Heavy,” but with a tone that implied I had everything under control. Why didn’t I tell my doctor I had viselike cramps and slept on a doggy wee-wee pad half the month to catch the overflow?

Every woman in a paper robe, facing her doctor, knows she is silently being judged. “Come on! It can’t be that bad,” a doctor once told me, diagnosing a mild case of gas three hours before I had an emergency appendectomy.

I’d had painful and heavy periods since adolescence, but they grew exponentially worse after the birth of my first child, in 1995. It wasn’t until just after my annual checkup in 2011, however, that my general practitioner became alarmed. A woman is considered anemic when she has fewer than 12 grams of hemoglobin per deciliter of blood. I had seven. “This can’t be right,” my doctor said, staring at my results. “How are you even standing?”

I was sitting. “I’ve been a little tired.” ( I’m exhausted! )

“Are you able to work and take care of the kids?”

“I do my best.” ( Who else is going to do it? )

“Look,” said my doctor. “We can either hospitalize you every month for anemia or you can go ahead and get a hysterectomy. It’s your choice, but not really? I don’t think getting transfusions every month is a sustainable life choice.”

“Whatever it’s called,” says Nora, “I want you to promise me you’ll get that hysterectomy this year.” Also, she doesn’t like the paperback cover design for my new novel, a picture of a woman lying on a park bench with a book in her hand. “She looks dead. Like the book was so boring, it killed her. ”

“I can’t do this anymore,” I finally admit to Nora. I call her early, too distraught to elaborate, after a particularly disturbing interaction with my husband the previous night.

She’s at her house in East Hampton and reserves me a ticket on the jitney while we are still on the phone. “I’ll meet you at the bus stop. Don’t eat. I’m making lunch.” Five years earlier, when I’d called to say I couldn’t attend the baby shower she was throwing for me, because my prematurely contracting uterus and I were now on bed rest, she showed up at my apartment with a dozen lobsters, two homemade lemon-meringue pies, our mutual friends, and her sleeves rolled up to do the dishes when the party was over.

I’ve told no one but my shrink about the darker corners of my marriage, but when Nora picks me up, I unearth all of it. Every last bone. A few years earlier, my husband was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and although the diagnosis helped us understand both his lack of empathy and my anger over its absence, it’s one thing to comprehend the origins of our marital dysfunction and quite another to fix it. I still feel alone, unseen, and frequently gaslit; he still feels confused and hurt by my seething fury.

After the exorcism, Nora’s husband, Nick, joins us for lunch, placing his hands gently on his wife’s shoulders before kissing the top of her head. “Is this for real?” I say dubiously, air-circling their conjoined heads with my finger: Harry and Sally, in their golden years. “Is this as good as it seems?” My jealousy burns almost as brightly as my admiration.

“No,” says Nick. “It’s better.”

“Deb!” Nora laughs, standing up and walking to the kitchen counter. “He’s my third husband. If you can’t get it right by your third marriage, well … Come. Help me carry the salad to the table.” She slices thick slabs of peasant bread. “Are you staying over tonight?”

“I can’t,” I say. “I have to pick up my son at 5:30.”

Nora purses her lips. “Might his father be able to do that?”

“I’ll ask,” I say, knowing before dialing his number that the answer will be no.

“You know I’m here for you if you decide to pull the plug,” she tells me, “but please: Try to fix the marriage before taking any drastic measures. Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.” She scribbles the name and number of her friend Joyce, a Jungian therapist who treats couples at an impasse, on a scrap of paper. “Joyce is a genius,” she says. “Call her.”

December 2011

“You’re not eating,” says Nora.

“I had a big breakfast.” Stress has eaten my appetite. Anemia has eaten my red blood cells.

“No. Sorry. You are not allowed to add anorexia onto adeno … whatever it’s called. Did you schedule that surgery yet?”

“I can’t have a major operation right now. I’ll do it after my novel comes out.”

“What exactly are you worried about when you imagine going under the knife?” she asks.

“I’m not worried about going under the knife,” I say, moving the pieces of cucumber and chicken around on my plate like pawns on a chessboard. “I’m worried about the aftermath.” The day after my appendectomy, my husband had asked me to bring him a Sudafed for his runny nose, because my side of the bed was closer to the bathroom. I fiddle with my wedding band: a new tic.

Nora notices. She notices everything. “How are things going with Joyce?”

“Joyce is great.”

“And the marriage?

I sigh. Not wanting to disappoint her, but unable to find hopeful words. “About as healthy as my uterus.”

She pauses, weighing her words. “He doesn’t have Asperger’s, you know. I’m sure of it.”

“What? No, stop.” This is the only argument we will ever have in our 11-year friendship, the only time her well-earned confidence about always being right gets in the way of the truth.

“But he’s so at ease at our dinner parties,” she says. “And he truly seems to love you. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s a ruse, his ease,” I say. “It’s a survival skill. He knows how to watch and listen carefully and learn behaviors. He watched rom-coms, for example, to figure out how to woo me.”

“Seriously?” says Nora, rom-com auteur.

“More or less,” I say.

“Okay, fine. I’ll stop.” She gives me the dreaded Nora Stare™: a raised-eyebrow, chin-down, crooked-mouth rebuke. “But that doesn’t mean I think you’re right.”

I laugh. “I wouldn’t want you any other way.” I look across the table at this daughterless woman who has all but adopted me and several other women. Who never judges my actions but tries to understand. Who champions my work, even when it’s not going well, and loves my children as if they were her own. Who teaches me, by example, how to navigate the postreproductive half of my life: Gather friends in your home and feed them, laugh in the face of calamity, cut out all the things––people, jobs, body parts––that no longer serve you.

After lunch, she flags down a taxi. “Are you feeling okay?” I ask. She lives three blocks away. She always walks home.

“I’m fine,” she says. She shuts the door and rolls down the window. “Schedule that surgery already, please! And be nice to your husband. One more shot, okay? For my sake.”

“Okay, okay!” I watch the blur of yellow that is Nora disappear up Madison Avenue and set a date for my hysterectomy.

“I’m dying to see you,” I write Nora, the morning after my surgery, at the precise moment when she, unbeknownst to me, is the one doing the hard work of dying. “Wanted to see what your summer looks like so we can plan something in, I dunno, late July?”

Unusually, she does not write back. Or even call. I’m unnerved. She always responds to my emails within an hour or two, max.

The hysterectomy—which, just as Nora had predicted, was done with robot arms—had lasted a little more than eight hours. I’d woken up in recovery to the sounds of the nurses whispering: “Where’s the husband? Has anyone seen the husband? We can’t reach him. Is there another number?”

“What?” I said, suddenly cogent and in pain.

“We can’t find your husband,” said the unfamiliar faces now hovering over my head. “Is there anyone else we can call at this time?”

“Yes. Call Nora, please.”

“Who’s Nora?” said the nurse.

“Nora Ephron. She’s listed. Call 411. That’s E-p-h-r- …”

“She’s delirious,” the nurses whispered.

Back home, less than 24 hours after surgery, I beg my husband for a lunch that never comes, for quiet that never falls, for help with our older son, who’s stuck downstairs in a taxi without cash to pay the fare. “I’m watching a movie,” he yells from the TV room. “Can you do it?”

I end up screaming at him with so much force, a hernia pops out of one of my incisions. “That’s it. I want a divorce,” I say. Nora will understand. She has to. I’ll call her first thing tomorrow to tell her.

Instead, I’m awoken by a series of texts from a friend, asking if I’ve heard the news: Nora is gravely ill. What? I call Nora’s cellphone. She doesn’t pick up. I write her another email. She doesn’t respond. Her death is announced the next day. Her face is all over the TV, her voice all over the radio; I have to turn off both to keep from weeping.

Her husband invites her friends to their apartment to eat the chicken-salad sandwiches Nora herself picked out for the occasion. “Why didn’t she tell us?” we all ask one another.

She’d told almost no one about her cancer, including her sons, until the end. Which was odd, as she was the self-proclaimed Queen of Indiscretion. Years before it was public knowledge, she told me and anyone else who would listen that Deep Throat was the FBI agent Mark Felt. At a dinner party, when a friend asked Nora if she was working on a new movie, she said yes but she wasn’t allowed to talk about it. Then she proceeded to spill every last detail about Julie & Julia , including the fact that she’d just spoken to Meryl Streep about coming on as its lead. How could she have kept her own terminal illness a secret?

Back home, my teenage daughter stops me as I head into the bathroom. “Mom,” she says, “I need to tell you something really personal, but I’ve been worried about telling you while you’re recovering. I didn’t want to bother you. The coincidence is just too … weird.”

“Hit me,” I say.

“Okay, so, while you were in the hospital? Like, literally during the exact hours when they were removing your uterus?”

“I got my period.”

“What?!!! No!!! That’s so crazy! Congratulations!” I hug her. I kiss her. The torch has been passed. Life goes on. What comes out of me can only be described as craughing: that combination of crying and laughter. “Do you have everything you need? I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for that. Do you even know how to use a—”

“Mom! Oh my God, stop. Yes. I’m the last one of my friends to get it. They taught me everything.”

“Okay, okay, but promise me one thing,” I say, channeling Nora.

“Sure,” she says, “what?”

“Promise me you’ll never be afraid to talk to me about anything.”

“Oh my God, Mom. Chill. It’s just my period.”

“No, no!” I laugh. “I’m not talking about periods. I mean, like … anything.”

“Duh, of course,” she says, and suddenly it strikes me: Of course Nora told no one about her illness. The transmission of woes is a one-way street, from child to mother. A good mother doesn’t burden her children with her pain. She waits until it becomes so heavy, it either breaks her or kills her, whichever comes first.

This article was adapted from Deborah Copaken’s book Ladyparts: A Memoir .

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The Most of Nora Ephron: The ultimate anthology of essays, articles and extracts from her greatest work, with a foreword by Candice Carty-Williams Paperback – October 6, 2022

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A NEW, REVISED EDITION OF THE ULTIMATE NORA EPHRON COLLECTION, PACKED WITH WIT, WISDOM AND COMFORT, WITH AN INTRODUCTION FROM CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS 'The perfect introduction to the iconic writer' STYLIST INCLUDING: * Nora's much-loved essays on everything from friendship to feminism to journalism * Extracts from her bestselling novel Heartburn * Scenes from her hilarious screenplay for When Harry Met Sally * Unparalleled advice about friends, lovers, divorces, desserts and black turtleneck sweaters 'It's got a little bit of everything, from witty essays on feminism, beauty, and ageing to profiles of empowering female figures' ELLE *PRAISE FOR NORA EPHRON* 'So bold and so vulnerable at the same time. I don't know how she did it' PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE 'Nora's exacting, precise, didactic, tried-and-tested, sophisticated-woman-wearing-all-black wisdom is a comfort and a relief' DOLLY ALDERTON 'Nora Ephron is the funniest, cleverest, wisest friend you could have' NIGELLA LAWSON 'I am only the one of millions of women who will miss Nora's voice' LENA DUNHAM

• Print length 480 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin
• Publication date October 6, 2022
• Dimensions 8.5 x 5.43 x 1.35 inches
• ISBN-10 1804991384
• ISBN-13 978-1804991381
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin (October 6, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1804991384
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1804991381
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.5 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 5.43 x 1.35 inches
• #76 in School Chalk
• #303 in Essays (Books)
• #312 in Humor Essays (Books)

About the author

Nora ephron.

Nora Ephron has received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay for When Harry Met Sally, Silkwood, and Sleepless in Seattle, which she also directed. She lived in New York City with her husband, writer Nicholas Pileggi.

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Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron was a celebrated columnist for Esquire from 1970 until 1989—but perhaps more famously, she was also a screenwriter, penning romantic comedy classics like 'When Harry Met Sally' and 'Sleepless in Seattle' and a Tony-award winning playwright; Ephron died in 2012 at the age of 71.

.css-1wsqiug{display:block;font-family:Lausanne,Lausanne-fallback,Lausanne-roboto,Lausanne-local,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal;margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0;padding-top:0.25rem;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}@media (any-hover: hover){.css-1wsqiug:hover{color:link-hover;}}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1wsqiug{margin-bottom:0.25rem;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-1wsqiug{margin-bottom:0.625rem;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1wsqiug{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 73.75rem){.css-1wsqiug{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.2;}} My Mother’s Mink Coat

Nora Ephron never wanted a mink coat until her mother died. Then she wanted her mother’s coat. So did her sister. A Love Story.

Helen Gurley Brown Only Wants to Help

Nora Ephron’s first article for Esquire—where she became a star essayist in the ’70s—is the definitive magazine profile of Helen Gurley Brown, who not only resurrected Cosmopolitan but revolutionized the magazine business.

A Few Words About Breasts

In a now iconic iteration of her Esquire column from 1972, Nora Ephron muses about “the hang-up of my life”—her breasts.

How Nora Ephron Said Goodbye to The Mary Tyler Moore Show

A fond farewell to the finest, funniest show on television.

The Michael Korda Situation

The married consciousness.

Women in Washington

Chaos at the bake-off, battle of the sexes on the tennis court.

This Nora Ephron Essay Is A Hilarious Reminder That It's OK To Not Have Your Life Totally Together

Everyone knows her: That woman who just seems to always be so perfectly put together. And she's not just killing it at work or in her relationships — she looks put together, too. Maybe her makeup is always impeccable. Or maybe her hair is never not on point. And maybe she has a seemingly neverending series of gorgeous handbags that are always perfectly organized. If you're anything like writer Nora Ephron , it's that last one that has you wallowing in some serious feelings of inadequacy. In her 2002 essay, "I Hate My Purse," Ephron talks about just that: how much she hates purses and all of the baggage, both literal and metaphorical, they can add to our shoulders. She writes:

"I hate my purse. I absolutely hate it. If you're one of those women who think there's something great about purses, don't even bother reading this because there is nothing here for you. This is for the women who hate their purses, who are bad at purses, who understand that their purses are reflections of their negligent housekeeping, hopeless disorganization, a chronic inability to throw anything away, and an ongoing failure to handle the obligations of a demanding and difficult accessory (the obligation, for example, that it should in someway match what you're wearing.)"

And that's just it, isn't it? Our purses mean so much more than just fashion. Ephron goes on to detail all of the different ways she tried to get around the purse problem. As a freelance writer she tried to go the super minimalist route. Often at home working, she was able to get away with packing just a lipstick, credit card and $20 bill in her pocket during nights out. Then she went the complete opposite way, buying a bag so big that she could fit too much in it — old airplane snacks in case she ever got hungry, a cosmetics back she forgot to zip and sunscreen she forgot to close, an electronic date book with no batteries and, of course, a pair of sneakers. She writes:

"Before you know it, your purse weights 20 pounds and you're in danger of getting bursitis and needing an operation just from carrying it around. Everything you own is in your purse. You could flee the Cossacks with your purse. But when you open it up, you can't find a thing in it — your purse is just a big dark hole that you spend hours fishing around for. A flashlight would help, but if you were to put it into your purse, you'd never find it."

The Most Of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron, $20, Amazon

Again, we all know that this isn't just about purses. This is about the difference between having it all together, like the girl with the perfectly organized designer tote, or falling apart at the seams as you stuff the entire contents of your studio apartment into some sort of pleather monstrosity. But, here's the thing: no one has it all together, even if their handbags make you think they do. Ephron learned this in stunning clarity on a trip to Paris with a friend, the sort of put-together woman who did think there was something great about purses. Her mission was to purchase a highly covetable (and highly expensive) vintage Hermès Kelly bag at a flea market. Let's just say, things didn't go quite according to plan. She writes:

"Anyway, my friend bought her Kelly bag. She paid twenty-six hundred dollars for it. The color wasn't exactly what she wanted, but it was in wonderful shape. Of course, it would have to be waterproofed immediately because it would lose half its value if it got caught in the rain...The two of us went to a bistro, and the Kelly bag was placed in the middle of the table, where it sat like a small shrine to a shopping victory. And then, outside, it began to rain."

It was right then and there that Ephron decided to give up on purses and, in essence, give up on the idea of "having it all together" by anyone's standards but her own. She went back to New York and bought herself a tote bag with an image of MetroCard emblazoned on its front. "It cost next to nothing," she writes, "and I will never have to replace it because it is completely indestructible. What's more, never having been in style, it can never go out of style." By ignoring all of the societal standards of what makes a great purse — i.e. what makes a great woman — Ephron found her own version of it. And really, what more can we do than that?

"And wherever I go," Ephron writes, "people say to me 'I love that bag.' 'Where did you get that bag?'...For all I know they've all gone off and bought one. Or else they haven't. It doesn't matter. I'm very happy."

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Nora Ephron at the Movies Explores the Queen of Rom-Com's Outsize Influence: Read an Excerpt Here (Exclusive)

A new book due out this fall features interviews and analysis on the 'When Harry Met Sally' and 'You've Got Mail' trailblazer

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Nora Ephron revolutionized the rom-com and now fans and newcomers to her work alike can get a deep dive into just how meaningful her impact on the genre has been.

Nora Ephron at the Movies: A Visual Celebration of the Writer and Director Behind When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, and More by PEOPLE writer and editor Ilana Kaplan, due out this fall from Abrams, details the beloved journalist, essayist, screenwriter, author, producer, director and feminist's life and work.

With a foreword by Jason Diamond, the book pairs detailed criticism with analysis of Ephron's work as a champion of the rom-com and a Hollywood trailblazer. It will also feature exclusive interviews with some of Ephron’s key collaborators, including Andie MacDowell and Jenn Kaytin Robinson, to add color and nuance to her life and legacy.

Below, read an exclusive excerpt from the book that explores how Ephron changed Hollywood forever.

Think of Nora Ephron as the fairy godmother of modern-day rom-coms. After years of a genre lying in wait, she waved her magic wand and penned dazzling scripts, equivalent to charming ball gowns for women who wouldn’t take any s---. She cast a spell on Hollywood with her charming plots, explosive chemistry and leading questions about destiny and romance.

Nora deserves significant credit for the rom-com boom of the 1990s and early 2000s, which created regular opportunities for women in writing, directing, and producing and created a modern commentary on dating and singledom that connected with audiences.

The widespread critical and commercial success of Nora’s genre-defining film When Harry Met Sally and the “hooker with a heart of gold” vehicle Pretty Woman (directed by Garry Marshall ) ushered in a new era for the rom-com. (The former earned a hefty $92.8 million at the box office, while the latter became the biggest rom-com hit in history by total number 1990, per Indiewire).

Its success helped kick off the era. But a rom-com about a prostitute love story wouldn’t have landed on its own. The rom-com renaissance was driven by the quirky “girl next door” types like Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts , the anchors for flawed female heroines and their quippy lines. And Nora continued to build on the success of When Harry Met Sally with 1993’s Sleepless in Seattle and 1998’s You’ve Got Mail —a trio of canonical projects.

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Before Nora, the rom-com had a reliable formula: boy meets girl, boy and girl have a conflict and then boy and girl resolve that conflict and live happily ever after, with film flourishes including bombshell leads, surface-level chemistry and predictable humor.

As trends came and went, the rom-com evolved and endured a series of makeovers: the Great Depression was dominated by screwball comedies like His Girl Friday (1940) and The Lady Eve (1941), elevated by Hollywood’s leading stars, such as Cary Grant and Barbara Stanwyck ; from the 1950s to the 1960s the rom-com was “radicalized” by the sexual liberation movement and resulted in movies such as The Battle of the Sexes (1960) and Lover Come Back (1961), where the enemies-to-lovers trope ran rampant.

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By the 1970s the rom-com formula turned redundant, aside from the introduction of Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), which homed in on insecurity, anxiety and bittersweet romances. The 1980s birthed high school rom-coms such as Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club , but the allure of rom-coms had largely dissipated at the box office, until Nora ushered in their golden age.

Growing up enamored with Old Hollywood romance flicks such as The Lady Vanishes (1938), An Affair to Remember (1957) and The Apartment (1960) informed Nora’s rom-com framework, but she brought her own personal twists to the genre. She added the neuroses of Woody Allen, quippy dialogue, a sense of nostalgia and real female heroines written through the female gaze.

And, as Andrew O’Hehir noted in Salon, “Ephron’s best scripts offered the comfort of an old-fashioned love story in what felt like a fizzy, urbane contemporary setting.”

She uncovered the perfect recipe for building chemistry, often in a gray metropolis such as New York or Seattle. In turn, Nora built a distinct sense of familiarity in all her characters, which made the genre more universally relatable. She made ordinary connections—an email exchange or a voice on a radio show—feel like destiny, quenching audiences’ thirst for old-school Hollywood romance with an added layer of vulnerability and intimacy.

Nora may not have invented the meet-cute, but she sure as hell took the reins and made it her own. With meet-cute after meet-cute in When Harry Met Sally ’s vignettes, we all started to believe that love could come from a cross-country road trip or a chance encounter in a bookstore.

Reprinted from  Nora Ephron at the Movies: A Visual Celebration of the Writer and Director Behind When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, and More , published by Abrams. Text copyright ©2024 Ilana Kaplan, Cover © 2024 Abrams.

Nora Ephron at the Movies will hit shelves on Oct. 29 and is available for pre-order now.

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From meet-cute to marriage breakdown: Streep and Nicholson shine in Nora Ephron’s bittersweet Heartburn

This forerunner to the writer’s charming romcoms is real and relatable – the truest of her meditations on love

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“D isarm the audience with comedy,” Fleabag’s creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, once said, “then punch them in the gut with drama when they least expect it.” She wasn’t actually invoking Nora Ephron’s autobiographical novel Heartburn or its film adaptation when offering this advice but both encapsulate it to a T.

Ephron, who died in 2012, is mostly remembered for writing and directing romantic comedies. Her oeuvre is packed with witty banter and charming meet-cutes: you’re probably picturing Meg Ryan simulating orgasm in a coffee shop, or Meg Ryan dumping Bill Pullman for Tom Hanks, or Meg Ryan dumping Greg Kinnear for Tom Hanks. Ephron also possessed a wryly observational and frequently acerbic wit, reminiscent of Dorothy Parker and David Sedaris, and Heartburn is at times so acerbic it’s enough to induce actual heartburn. Its apparent dearth of charm is perhaps why it’s less universally beloved than When Harry Met Sally (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993) or You’ve Got Mail (1998). After all, its basic plot – “man serially cheats on his heavily pregnant wife” – isn’t exactly conducive to Netflix and chilling.

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Heartburn is a fictionalised retelling of Ephron’s doomed second marriage to the political journalist Carl Bernstein, whom she learned was having an affair while she was pregnant with their second son. After filing for divorce she channelled her heartbreak into the story of a food writer, Rachel, whose journalist husband, Mark, has an affair … while she is pregnant with their second son. The parallels are transparent and Bernstein threatened to sue. He never did.

Ephron’s 1986 film adaptation, directed by Mike Nichols, stars Meryl Streep as Rachel and Jack Nicholson as Mark (Mandy Patinkin was the original Mark but apparently there wasn’t enough chemistry between them). It also features Jeff Daniels, Stockard Channing and Catherine O’Hara; Kevin Spacey and a young Natasha Lyonne make their film debuts. But the star-studded cast could not save it from being fairly well panned.

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It’s not the acting: Streep is movingly vulnerable and Nicholson is suitably slimy. It’s rumoured that he repeatedly flirted with Streep during filming while in a long-term relationship with Anjelica Huston and while Streep was pregnant. In scenes depicting the couple when they are (at least ostensibly) happy, there’s chemistry as well as moments of genuine sweetness. Any feeling that we are being kept at arm’s length reflects how Rachel keeps Mark at a distance, as well as the facade she projects to prevent herself from falling apart. It shows the devastating banality of marital crises; how even in the depths of despair, people have to press on.

To my mind, critics have historically focused too much on the film’s caustic burn and entirely missed its beating heart. The late Roger Ebert condemned Heartburn for lacking Ephron’s usual “loin-churning passion” and said her lack of objectivity made it “bitter” and “sour”. I like to imagine Ephron responding with a recipe for lemon loaf or a whiskey sour, as befitting her character Rachel’s occupation as a food writer. The film’s characters, Ebert scathingly concluded, were “‘only marginally interesting”’. In some ways he might have been right. But I would argue that the very elements he criticised are what make it real and relatable, and therefore the truest of Ephron’s meditations on love.

Is Heartburn a perfect movie? No. Is it a date night pick? Probably not, unless you’re planning on dumping your date that night. But is it as cold and charmless as critics have claimed? I think not. I would go so far as to say it’s inherently hopeful. As Rachel finally decides whether to forgive Mark, we feel hopeful she will find love again: even if it’s for herself.

As for Ephron, she was married three times and the third one stuck: she stayed with the Goodfellas and Casino screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi for more than 20 years. In her final essay collection she wrote a list of what she would miss when she died. It was funny and frank, and consisted of the banalities that make up the tapestry of a life well lived. At the top of the list were her children and husband. She knew a thing or two about real love.

Heartburn is available to stream on Prime Video in Australia, UK and US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here

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