Nora Ephron in Profile(s)
This month, we are asking the important questions: Who even is Nora Ephron? And what have people (other than us) thought of her, anyway?
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This month, we are asking the important questions: Who even is Nora Ephron? And what have people (other than us) thought of her, anyway?
Who was Nora?
Marama: For those yet to be inducted into the Nora Ephron fan club, let me introduce you. Nora Ephron was a Jewish American writer—a journalist, essayist, novelist, and playwright—perhaps best known during her life for her semi-autobiographical novel, Heartburn. She was also a screenwriter and director, and gave us the golden romantic comedy trilogy of When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail, among other films—some good, and some (arguably) less good.
Nora was born in New York, a city with which she was forever connected, despite being raised in California. Her parents were well-known screenwriters, and she was the eldest of four daughters. She eventually made her way back to New York after university, where she started out at Newsweek magazine as a mail girl, because in 1962 the magazine did not employ women as writers.
(I need to pause here for a brief but important fact check: Some websites, including Wikipedia, claim that Nora participated in a landmark class action sex discrimination complaint against Newsweek.1 In fact, Nora had left the magazine long before women started organising in 1969, and as Newsweek was one of the few publications during this period to resolve such a complaint without back pay for former employees, Nora had no involvement. We know that Wikipedia needs a published citation to change something so, someone, anyone, please read this and fix this error so I can stop grinding my teeth over it.)2
After Newsweek, Nora carved out a career for herself at some less openly discriminatory publications, including the New York Post and Esquire, where she often wrote on the burgeoning women’s movement. She kept busy, publishing four books during the 1970s. She also married Watergate-reporter Carl Bernstein in 1976, and they were the It Couple around town, until Nora found out he was cheating on her while pregnant with their second child. Her novel about this experience, Heartburn, was published in 1983, at which point Nora became extremely famous for being extremely divorced.3
In the 1980s, her focus shifted to film. She began as a screenwriter with a splash—receiving an Oscar nomination for her very first screenplay—and by the 1990s she had turned her hand to directing her own scripts. In total, she directed eight films, and wrote the screenplays for another seven. In the 2000s she changed medium again, this time to plays, and wrote three before her death. She continued to write articles and published two more books, before she died in 2012 aged only 71, of an aggressive form of leukemia.
Nora through the years
As might be clear, Nora was a prolific writer and filmmaker, and there is no shortage of her work to dive into. But like good historians, we want to first start with some context, to help us think about who Nora was—or at least who the public thought she was—at different points in her life.
Using five key interviews with Nora from five different decades, we want to consider how the public idea of Nora changed during her lifetime, as she moved from one art form to another.4
1970s: “Nora Ephron On Crazy Salad” (Interview by Studs Terkel, WFMT, July 28, 1975, via WFMT Studs Terkel Radio Archive)
Marama: As someone who wrote their PhD on how women in media navigated the 1970s feminist movement, I was interested to see Nora introduced in this 1975 radio interview as “a feminist and a journalist.” It could be difficult for women to balance this divide during the 1970s, at a time when (male) editors tended to be suspicious of women journalists who self-identified as feminists. I suspect that Nora managed to get around this by writing columns and features, rather than news stories. But she is preaching to the choir (it’s me, hi) when she observes here that she “never believed in objective journalism.” Maybe that honesty is why her voice felt so new and exciting in the 1960s, and somehow remained so even fifty years later.
We only have an excerpt from this full interview—recorded following the publication of her second collection of essays, Crazy Salad—but it is clear here that Nora was already being positioned as a promising young woman writer, with the emphasis on her youth and gender. She does make some attempt to connect her interest in women and feminist to politics (the personal is political, after all) but as her big break was an essay called “A Few Words About Breasts,” it is perhaps unsurprising that interviewers wanted her to talk about being a woman above all else.
1980s: “Some Things About Nora Ephron” (Article by Amy Gross, Vogue, May 1983, via ProQuest5
Marama: Of all the interviews we have looked at, this is the only one in an outlet traditionally considered a women’s magazine. Published around the release of Heartburn, a substantial part of this interview is basically just ‘so, how much of Heartburn is actually true?' It’s interesting to see Nora push against that idea, while also acknowledging that she has constructed a cage of her own making. There is a frequent assumption of women creatives that all of their work must be autobiographical (based on the inherently sexist idea that women don't have the creative ability to draw from outside their own experience).6 The truth, of course, is often more complicated. In this interview Nora describes Heartburn as “a work of the imagination,” while also freely admitting, “the truth is, the day my marriage ended I knew I had a novel.”
This article includes another fun easter egg. The quote “everything is copy” is often attributed to Nora herself (usually in a Twitter bio or a pastel Instagram graphic). Trueheads know this actually came from Nora’s mother, and she notes as much in this interview.7 But this sentiment certainly informed Nora’s work through her career, and is linked to the question of fiction vs autobiography, which continued to follow her.
1990s: “On the Front Lines With Nora Ephron” (Article by Lawrence Frascella, Rolling Stone, July 8, 1993)
Hollie: This Rolling Stone interview, published a month after Sleepless in Seattle’s US release, captures Nora on the precipice of her transition from well-known “caustic critic to purveyor of modern romance.” After reading it, I better understand how Nora captures so many people’s admiration and attention: she’s very blunt, funny, and very (very) quotable. I appreciate how straightforwardly she talked about money: she took on Sleepless because it was “a cash infusion,” and started writing screenplays out of “economic desperation.”8 It’s also interesting to see how she responds to a series of girl-power-esque questions from Lawrence Frascella. Nora gamely shared what she thought about Roseanne Arnold and Hillary Clinton, while brushing off questions about the “having it all” and the challenges of being a female director.9
While there are lots of lovely details, it’s the final exchange of this interview that will stay with me. When asked whether she thought the success of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle would see her remembered as “some queen of romance,” Nora scoffed. Looking back, it can seem inevitable that Nora became a cultural institution, remembered for her rom-coms. This is a good reminder that nothing is certain!
2000s: “Nora Knows What To Do” (Article by Ariel Levy, The New Yorker, June 29, 2009)
Marama: I love this article, and only partially because it describes Nora at the James Beard Awards, which my fellow Top Chef devotees will know as the foodie Oscars. This interview conceit was presumably chosen because Nora was promoting Julie & Julia, her 2009 biographical film about American cooking personality Julia Child and the blogger who decided to cook through her most famous cookbook. Food has long been a preoccupation of Nora’s—in Heartburn, she made the protagonist a food writer and included numerous recipes, and in When Harry Met Sally we get Sally’s idiosyncratic ordering style.10 But being in a space like the James Beard Awards also gives us direct insight into Nora in the wild. Strangers feel comfortable to come up to her and comment on her looks, her divorce, her kids.
In 2009, Nora was already three years into the cancer diagnosis which she kept secret from the public until her death. That certainly puts a different spin on the descriptions of her as “compact,” and the scene where she eats “very slowly, in small, tidy bites.” And when her close friend (!) Joan Didion says she has “never been aware of Nora in a low mood,” and her sister Delia describes her as “a force—she’s unstoppable,” it’s difficult now not to wonder if they were referring to something entirely more personal that the professional failures interviewer was Ariel Levy asking them about.
2010s: “An Interview with Nora Ephron” (Interview by Kathryn Borel, The Believer, March 1, 2012)
Hollie: As a Nora Ephron newbie, I loved the way this interview glossed over her decades-long career as a writer—and, as a historian with an irrepressible impulse to periodise time, I appreciated Nora’s delineation of her life into different eras. “I definitely divide my life into decades,” she said. “Almost every ten years, something in my life changes. My twenties were my journalistic phase, then there was my screenwriting phase, then I became a director, then I started doing some plays…”. It’s interesting how closely this maps onto the profiles we’ve selected—with the exception of her Heartburn phase, which seems conspicuously absent.11
This interview whet my appetite to read Nora’s work. She spoke about writing in such an incisive way, and perfectly captured what distinguishes blogging/internet writing from writing in other mediums: “it was meant to be a piece of writing that started a conversation among the readers. Which became a reason for people to read it, so that they could then express what they thought about it.”12
The Ephron-A-Thon: Starting a Conversation
Hollie: In a good conversation, people understand the terrain: what’s the vibe? What are we talking about? To what end? Our hope is that this survey of profiles helped establish the conversational terrain of The Ephron-A-Thon. Not only do we have a solid contextual base to start our newsletter expedition, but hopefully ya’ll have a clearer sense of what our Ephron-exploration will look like.13
What’s the vibe? History-inflected cultural analysis (with jokes in footnotes). What are we talking about? The Ephron family’s rich and complex body of work. To what end? To have and to start interesting conversations about culture, writing, and the past. At the risk of straining this already strained metaphor, we hope you’ll join us for this virtual dinner party conversation!
Up Next: Heartburn (1983)
In March, we will be tackling (what else?) the novel that made Nora New York’s most famous divorcee: Heartburn. March 12, 2023 will be the 40th anniversary of Heartburn’s publication, and as a little baby newsletter we have to grab onto that SEO.
The anniversary also means that, if you’d like to read along with us, you are truly spoiled for choice: your local library almost certainly has a copy, you could snag an anniversary edition with a foreword from Stanley Tucci, or you could listen to Meryl Streep narrate the audio book. Just don’t try and cheat by watching the 1986 film adaptation—we’ll be coming to that separately in another newsletter.
Hollie: I asked for a copy of Heartburn for Christmas, and I’m so excited to pull it from my towering bedside TBR stack. I respect a book that comes in at under 200 pages, and I’m curious to read the book that started Nora’s transition from vaguely famous to famous-famous.14
Marama: I love Heartburn, but mostly I’m excited because this will give me an opportunity to talk about how Nora worked out who Deep Throat was during Watergate, and then spent decades sharing his then-still-very-top-secret identity with her sons, their friends and classmates, and pretty much anyone else who asked her.
I blame the Good Girls Revolt TV series for this, even if it gave us Meryl Streep’s daughter as Nora, in a fun full-circle moment (after Meryl played Nora’s alter ego in Heartburn).
We know Wikipedia needs a published source to make an edit from that time Slate interviewed Emily St. John Mandel about being divorced, so that she could update her own Wikipedia to say that she was divorced.
This is despite the fact that she soon after married for the third and final time to Nicholas Pileggi, and they remained together from 1987 until her death.
You’ll note that this list doesn’t include any obituaries, despite the public outpouring following her death. We are planning another newsletter to dig into these at a later date.
We’ll try our best to always use sources that are publicly available, but occasionally we need to draw on our academic privilege for a database or two. We’ll try not to be too obnoxious about it.
It is a claim that was levelled enough at Nora that she is called out as the prime example in this excellent essay on the subject.
I have to define “trueheads” because my parents subscribe to this newsletter. Hello!
A debate for another time: is Nora a nepo baby? Potentially this was a debate for 2022, before celebrities ruined the nepo baby concept.
When Nora was asked about sexist attitudes from film crews, she offhandedly mentioned that she “would be very way of Australians.” I’m…concerned!
Which brings us back to the Heartburn salad dressing of it all.
This interview has made me enormously excited to delve into Nora’s journalism: apparently she was tasked with “[finding] the most expensive apartment for rent in New York” to report on. AD Tour who?
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I spent close to a year in Tennessee and North Carolina during my PhD, and hereby claim the right to use “y’all” as a gender inclusive and ultimately very fun substitution for “you guys.”
I’m also honest enough to admit that I am hoping reading this will give me some insight into Olivia Wilde and her ongoing celebrity messiness (affectionate). See the doyen of celebrity gossip, Hunter Harris, for more info.
what a clever concept to introduce nora ephron and more interestingly how she was defined by "the culture" throughout her career. can't WAIT for the heartburn analysis, it's one of my favorite novels.