I feel bad that Nora Ephron is no longer with us. I miss her spunk, her humor, and her style. I miss her honesty, and her outspoken feminist point of view. Although she’s been dead for nearly two years, I have been visiting her thanks to the recently published, The Most of Nora Ephron, a sizable book that contains much of her best writing, including the entire text of Heartburn, the novel about her marriage to Carl Bernstein that won her so many fans and supporters while vilifying the character of the famous Watergate reporter in perpetuity.
What I enjoyed most in The Most….. were Ephron’s early essays. I didn’t read Esquire or Cosmopolitan back in the 1970s, so I missed some wonderful insights and writing. Ephron’s slant on the events and personalities of that era was radical and insightful, and ranged from amusing to hilarious.
We were born two years apart, during the second world war. Nora graduated from Wellesley College in 1962 and returned in 1996 to deliver the commencement address. In her speech, she reminded all those graduates of how much the world had changed. Referring to her own class, Ephron said, “We weren’t meant to have futures; we were meant to marry them. We weren’t meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions, or lives; we were meant to marry them.” She noted that a teaching degree was recommended as something to fall back on—in case you didn’t find a husband. Ephron did find a husband—three of them—but she never taught school. She wanted to be a writer.
She went to New York to find a job and ended up at Newsweek working in the mail room while young men with college degrees were hired as reporters. She was then promoted to “clipper,” which involved cutting out articles from national newspapers and sending them to relevant departments. Next rung was “researcher,” a fancy name for “fact checker.” This was all moving too slowly for Ephron who was easily bored. In most cities, it helps to know people if you want to jump start a career, and Ephron was always good at this. She made friends with a magazine publisher, Victor Navasky, who asked her to write a parody of a well-known New York Post gossip column. She did, and The Post almost sued, but instead, the publisher, Dorothy Schiff, thought if someone could write that well, she should hire her. This launched a career that went from reporting to commentary to films to stage plays. Nora Ephron wrote for so many decades that her early writing seems dated to younger readers who probably never heard of Helen Gurley Brown or Deep Throat, Julie Eisenhower or Craig Claiborne, but if you lived consciously, or even unconsciously, through the ’70s, these names will bring back the amazement of Cosmopolitan Magazine, Watergate, and the beginning of the food revolution. Ephron documented so much of it and continued to do so into the 21st century. She mined the irony, skewered the duplicitous, admired the great talents, and was painfully honest and therefore funny where her own looks, cooking, and sex life were concerned.
I feel bad that I am using the past tense. I didn’t know how much there was to miss until I picked up The Most of Nora Ephron at the library. Check it out yourself if you want to be reminded of how comical we all were, and still are.
“Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live 20 more years? Is life too short or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really going to have to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in America is so unbelievably delicious? And what about chocolate?”