This is a must-read for Nora Ephron fans, who will laugh and cry along through this revealing and insightful look at one of America’s most beloved screenwriters. How Old Was Nora Ephron When She Died?

Ephron's son, Jacob Bernstein, directed an HBO movie on her life titled Everything Is Copy. [36] As of 2021, he was a reporter for The New York Times. [37] Nora Ephron and Lena Dunham". Criterion Channel. Archived from the original on March 21, 2020 . Retrieved March 21, 2020. She is credited as being a wedding guest in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and as a Dinner Party Guest in Husbands and Wives (1992). Ephron was married for more than 20 years to screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi from 1987 until her death in 2012. The couple lived in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles and in New York City. [ citation needed]

When Harry Met Sally is one of my favorite movies, so obviously reading the screenplay was a delight. After the screenplay concludes we get a brief reflective from Ephron, penned in 1990. She breaks down the politics of writing a movie (how many edits you go through, how much the characters of your voices change), and also lifts the curtain a bit on the goings ons with When Harry Met Sally. I did not know that it was Meg Ryan's idea to fake an orgasm in Katz's ; nor did I realize Billy Crystal came up with the famous "I'll have what she's having line." Good on Ephron for being honest that these bits don't belong to her. I almost bought this for a friend’s birthday present - and I’m glad I didn’t. Not because the writing isn’t funny, intelligent and interesting (it is) but because this isn’t the best way to enjoy it. I’ve previously ready Heartburn, a small extract of which is included in this edition, and I’m glad this isn’t my first introduction to Ephron’s writing, because otherwise it may have been my last. By then, Ephron had found the real thing. In 1987, she married Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote the books (and the screenplays) that became “Goodfellas” and “Casino,” and who remained with her until her death. In Ephron’s final film, “Julie & Julia” (2009), she explored her hallmark themes beyond the boundaries of time or traditional romance. The story flits between two threads: one, set in the fifties, in which Julia Child (Meryl Streep) strains to publish her first book, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” in a male-dominated industry, and another, set in the two-thousands, in which Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a failed novelist trapped in a soul-crushing job, becomes so devoted to Child’s book that she decides to cook each of its five hundred and twenty-four recipes in the course of a year. Also, she’ll blog about it.

First of all: I wish the person who put this collection together had inserted themselves a few times. I think broader context for some of the more dated and outdated entries would have been helpful. But alas, he stayed silent. So here are my thoughts: Nora, thankfully, provided the witty woman writer with a much better template. You can be female and funny, and you can soar, both personally and professionally. Not without challenges, of course, but Nora showed us how to navigate those as well. When hubby Carl Bernstein betrayed her, for instance, Ephron turned his betrayal into the best-selling “Heartburn,” then went on to find lasting love with writer Nicholas Peggi. I cried. It was great. Also, I didn't know that Betty Freidan became such a fractious and narrow-minded figure in her later years. Ephron is so funny and hospitable that it's tempting to devour it. With a few exceptions, including essays about wanting bigger breasts and feeling bored when getting manicures, it will entertain male readers as much as women. Independent But the revelation of this collection may be her early work, for those who haven’t read it — or haven’t read it for years. The recent essays are still worth revisiting, but the 1970s pieces sparkle with prescience and intense curiosity. Her distinctive voice, that mix of anthropologist and the sharer of impolitic confidences, was clear and intact from the start, as she turned her focus onto feminism of the 1970s, the Scotch-drenched news industry and its institutionalized sexism, and figures such as Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Helen Gurley Brown. Ephron did continue to write about politics later in her career, but these early pieces, so unusual for their time, are precious.I particularly enjoyed Ephron’s magazine journalism from the 1970s, especially her articles about the dawn of the Women‘s Movement, which vividly evoke the sense of possibility, solidarity and excitement (not to mention the petty infighting and rivalries) of those early days. I have spent a great deal of my life discovering that my ambitions and fantasies—which I once thought of as totally unique—turn out to be clichés,” Nora Ephron wrote in 1973, in a column for Esquire. Ephron was then thirty-two, and her subject was the particular clichéd ambition of becoming Dorothy Parker, a writer she had idolized in her youth. Ephron first met Parker as a child, in her pajamas, at her screenwriter parents’ schmoozy Hollywood parties. They crossed paths again when Ephron was twenty; she remembered the meeting in crisp detail, describing Parker as “frail and tiny and twinkly.” But her encounters with the queen of the bon mot weren’t the point. “The point is the legend,” Ephron wrote. “I grew up on it and coveted it desperately. All I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker. The funny lady. The only lady at the table.” Collins, Gail (June 27, 2012). "Nora Ephron, the Best Mailgirl Ever". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved November 26, 2016.

O'Grady, Megan (September 30, 2014). "Lena Dunham Talks to _Vogue'_s Book Critic About Her New Collection of Essays, Not That Kind of Girl, and Why Now Is Such a Pivotal Time for Women". Vogue . Retrieved April 1, 2020. Nguyen, Hanh (October 31, 2016). " 'Good Girls Revolt': The Women Who Fought for Equality in the Newsroom | IndieWire". www.indiewire.com . Retrieved November 26, 2016.My Oma gave me this book. Her best friend (since they were in high school in the 1940s) saw it and remembered that I had always wanted to be a writer in my youth. So she bought it for me. Is that going to color how I feel about this book? Absolutely. For the truly vengeful, the pen (or word processor) is mightier than the sword". Cosmopolitan. July 1, 1996. Archived from the original on October 5, 2007 . Retrieved August 17, 2007.

Glassman, Thea (September 12, 2016). "Richard Cohen and Nora Ephron: The Real-Life Harry and Sally". The Forward. The Forward Organization, Inc . Retrieved May 28, 2017. Nora Ephron Biography Photo". 2007. Awards Council member and famed filmmaker George Lucas presenting award-winning director and screenwriter Nora Ephron with the Golden Plate Award at the 2007 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. The young Ephron was a savvy and expansive media critic, weighing the news value of the private lives of political figures long before that question was exploited by Ken Starr and today’s cruder media. When she wrote about a publication — the Palm Beach Social Pictorial, for example, or the newsletter of her D.C. apartment building — she simultaneously wrote about a place, its culture, and the times.Ragtime, The Scottsboro Boys, The Addams Family and Finian's Rainbow Top Nominations for 2010 Drama Desk Awards". Ephron was born in New York City in 1941, to the playwrights Henry and Phoebe Ephron. When she was five, the family moved to Los Angeles, where the Ephrons wrote for the movies. Henry and Phoebe were talented—they penned several sharp screwball comedies, including the Hepburn-Tracy vehicle “Desk Set”—but they also struggled, battling both alcoholism and the occasional allegation of Communist sympathizing. Doidge doesn’t have much original research about Nora’s youth; many of her quotes come from Ephron’s public interviews and essays, as well as from “Everything Is Copy,” a 2015 documentary directed by Ephron’s son, the journalist Jacob Bernstein. But she does speak to a few of Ephron’s old summer-camp friends, one of whom recalls Ephron as a “natural leader.” The most telling detail is from Ephron’s years at Camp Tocaloma, in Arizona, where she would regale her bunkmates with her mother’s lively letters from home. “My friends—first at camp, then at college—would laugh and listen, utterly rapt at the sophistication of it all,” Ephron said in her mother’s eulogy, in 1971. Ephron’s arc as an American storyteller was various and unique . . . Her works are bound by her equitable sensibility, cool observational skills, and irresistible trains of thought . . . [She was] a cultural sophisticate driven by the gritty, truth-obsessed heart of a journalist . . . a savvy and expansive media critic . . . a master of the art of common sense . . . with assured charm, dead-on honesty, and wry humor . . . Her distinctive voice, that mix of anthropologist and the sharer of impolitic confidences, was clear and intact from the start . . . The 1970s pieces sparkle with prescience and intense curiosity . . . Rich.”—Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Globe It's got a little bit of everything, from witty essays on feminism, beauty, and ageing to profiles of empowering female figures' ELLE Ephron herself seems destined to have become a feminist. One of four daughters of Henry and Phoebe Ephron, a successful screening-writing team (responsible for movie classics like “Desk Set”) Nora was raised both to write and to make a good living at it by an uber- successful career woman who famously advised her daughter, on her own death bed: “take notes.”