Brilliant. Warm. Witty.
It’s not unusual for somebody to be described by these terms in death, but to be defined by them in life is. Nora Ephon’s work, a conduit for her wondrously lived life, never left us guessing how she might one day be eulogized.
She was a genius; a successful journalist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, producer, director, and blogger. Any of us would do well to master one of those, and she mastered all of them simultaneously on the largest stages.
Her name is synonymous with critically acclaimed blockbuster movies that came to define romance for a generation. We all know these movies. Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless In Seattle, and Julie & Julia, to name a few. But here’s the thing: This stuff isn’t what she was made of at her core.
Nora Ephron was comprised of so much more than what commonly defines her. Her gift wasn’t how she wrote, it was how she lived. Metaphorically, when faced with fourth and goal she ran the ball in herself. T h i s was her gift.
The daughter of screen writer parents, she wrote for the weekly campus newspaper while majoring in political science at Wellesley College. Once graduated, she interned in JFK’s White House and then moved on to an entry level position at Newsweek. During a strike by the International Typographic Union she rallied friends and cranked out a publication that parodied the New York Post. Dorothy Schiff, the publisher of New York Post, was paying attention and when the strike ended made quick work of hiring Ephron, giving her free rein to write about anything related to New York City. With that, she honed her skills writing more often than not about sex, food, and The Big Apple. While plying her trade for Newsweek, she began contributing essays to Esquire, New York, and The New York Times Magazine.
If there was any doubt as to the height of ethereal divinity achieved when her heart and head collaborated, consider the titles of her works of collected essays, each of which sucked us helpless and giggling into her stories: A Few Words About Breasts, Wallflower At The Orgy, Crazy Salad, Love, Loss And What I Wore, I Remember Nothing, and perhaps the most inspired title of all, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Reflections On Being A Woman. Nora knew… she knew how to speak to us.
But there was more. She was married to Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein during the Watergate scandal. With him, she rewrote the script for All The President’s Men, and although it was not used it once again got her noticed and lead to her being hired to write her first screenplay. If that wasn’t enough, she maintained from the outset of her bitter separation from Bernstein that she not only knew that Deep Throat was FBI top dog Mark Felt, but that she would tell anyone who asked. And she did tell anyone who asked but the media seemed wholly uninterested. When it was confirmed in 2005 that Felt was indeed Deep Throat, Arianna Huffington invited her to blog about it. Ephron accepted, and subsequently became a regular contributor to The Huffington Post.
I could not bring myself to utter, “Rest in peace” when she died. I don’t want her to rest in peace. I want her to walk up to Christopher Hitchens with a glass of wine in one had and a life well lived in the other, kick him in the shin, and demand to know just how funny he thinks women are now.
She was stopped in her tracks before she was done transcribing all of the things we needed and wanted to know about ourselves. Therefore her death should leave us not with a sense of loss but rather with a sense of purpose: There will never be another Nora Ephron, but surely there is another woman, another deeply intelligent, driven, kind, brilliantly funny, dignified straight shooter who sees the world perhaps not the same way Ephron did, but through the same filters.
Rise up, my brilliant, warm, witty friends. Rise up.
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