best nora ephron essays

Every Nora Ephron Book That Should Be on Your Shelf

Beginning with I Feel Bad About My Neck .

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You see this New York Times quote plastered all over every book jacket that shares her byline: “Nora Ephron can write about anything better than anybody else can write about anything.” The late Nora Ephron, who passed at 71 in 2012, was funny, truthful, frank, and unapologetic. From her essays in Esquire to her screenplays for Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally… , she made us laugh, love, and fall into a blubbering mess. So before you start poring over the most anticipated books of 2020 or the best reads of 2019 , let’s reflect on the work of a woman who wrote page after page telling it like it is. Below, we’re recounting Nora Ephron's best books.

I Feel Bad About My Neck

In this 2006 book, Nora Ephron got candid about the harsh yet glorious truth that is aging. “Your neck is the thing saying, ‘Don’t kid yourself.’ You can put spackle on your face, basically, but this is the thing that is saying, ‘Uh-oh.’” In other words, the neck doesn’t lie. And neither does Nora. She goes on to share other truths, too, about women and getting older.

I Remember Nothing

I Remember Nothing is full of anecdotal gifts you will never forget. A singular voice, Ephron reflects on the early days of her career—memories of her time working as a mail girl at Newsweek and writing for Esquire —while taking every opportunity to get real about her life at the time she was penning this memoir, making sure to leave no “senior moment” unturned.

Cookbook author Rachel Samstat just learned news that would make even the sweetest soufflé taste sour: Her husband’s having an affair. Oh, did we mention she’s seven months pregnant and the mistress is a swanlike beauty with legs for days? A comedy with a side of misery, this one’s begging for the screen treatment. Which it received in 1986, starring cinema royalty Meryl Streep in the lead.

When Harry Met Sally…

Technically a screenplay published as a novel, When Harry Met Sally… needs no introduction. A smash-hit the day it was released into theaters in 1989, Nora Ephron’s witty banter and “I’ll have what she’s having” big-O scene plays out even better between two covers. And bonus: There’s an introduction by the author.

Imaginary Friends

Nora Ephron uses Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, both novelists and activists who died in the early 1900s, as a springboard for her Imaginary Friends play hailed as “wickedly funny” and “sharp-eyed and even sharper-clawed.” Basically, Ephron creates an imaginary world in which the two women go at each other and air their grievances. In hilarious form, of course.

Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble

No topic was barred from the sharp wit scribbled with Nora Ephron’s pen. From politics to Pillsbury, she covered it all during her career, be it as a novelist, a magazine writer, or screenplay scripter. With Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble , we get a slice of Ephron’s classic essay collections, including “A Few Words About Breasts” and “The New Porn.”

Wallflower at the Orgy

She had us at the title. A suggestive collective of magazine essays, Wallflower at the Orgy was first published in 1970 and includes her first writings, according to the book’s preface, which was written by Ephron. She writes about how over time working as a reporter, she found her first-person voice, transforming her from “wallflower at the orgy” into “life of the party.”

The Most of Nora Ephron

Think of The Most of Nora Ephron as a big book of everything you already love about the acute author, bound together into one tome begging to be dog-eared. You have the old: her novel, Heartburn ; her screenplay for When Harry Met Sally…, her beloved essays, and you have the new: her play Lucky Guy , a portrait of tabloid writer Mike McAlary, which was first published in this volume.

Nora Ephron: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

Like many of the selections in this roundup, Nora Ephron: The Last Interview and Other Conversations dives into the writer’s preliminary years working as a journalist at numerous publications. But it also offers fans a peek into her final interview, a tear-jerking piece originally published in the Believer magazine.

DeAnna Janes is a freelance writer and editor for a number of sites, including Harper’s BAZAAR, Tasting Table, Fast Company and Brit + Co, and is a passionate supporter of animal causes, copy savant, movie dork and reckless connoisseur of all holidays. A native Texan living in NYC since 2005, Janes has a degree in journalism from Texas A&M and  got her start in media at US Weekly before moving on to O Magazine, and eventually becoming the entertainment editor of the once-loved, now-shuttered DailyCandy. She’s based on the Upper West Side.

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Every Nora Ephron Book That Should Be on Your Shelf

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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.

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Moving On, a Love Story

In February, 1980, two months after the birth of my second child and the simultaneous end of my marriage, I fell madly in love. I was looking for a place to live, and one afternoon I walked just ten steps into an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and my heart stood still. This was it. At first sight. Eureka. Ten steps in and I said, “I’ll take it.”

The apartment was huge. It was on the fifth floor of the Apthorp, a famous stone pile at the corner of Broadway and Seventy-ninth Street. The rent was fifteen hundred dollars a month, which, by Manhattan standards, was practically a bargain. Trust me, it was. In addition, I had to pay the previous tenant twenty-four thousand dollars in key money (as it’s known in New York City) for the right to move in. I didn’t have twenty-four thousand dollars. I went to a bank and borrowed the money. No one in the building could believe that I would pay so much in key money for a rental apartment; it was an astronomical amount. But the apartment had beautiful rooms (most of them painted taxicab yellow, but that could easily be fixed); high ceilings; lots of light; two gorgeous (although nonworking) fireplaces; and five, count them, five bedrooms. It seemed to me that if I lived in the building for twenty-four years the fee would amortize out to only a thousand dollars a year, a very small surcharge. I mean, we’re talking about only $2.74 a day, which is less than a cappuccino at Starbucks. Not that there was a Starbucks then. And not that I was planning to live in the Apthorp for twenty-four years. I was planning to live there forever. Till death did us part. So it would probably amortize out to even less. That’s how I figured it. (I should point out that I don’t normally use the word “amortize” unless I’m trying to prove that something I can’t really afford is not just a bargain but practically free. This usually involves dividing the cost of the item I can’t afford by the number of years I’m planning to use it, or, if that doesn’t work, by the number of days or hours or minutes, until I get to a number that is less than the cost of a cappuccino.)

But forget the money. This, after all, is not a story about money. It’s a story about love. And all stories about love begin with a certain amount of rationalization.

I had never planned to live on the Upper West Side, but after a few weeks I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, and I began, in my manner, to make a religion out of my neighborhood. This was probably a consequence of my not having any other religion in my life, but never mind. I was a block from H & H Bagels and Zabar’s. I was half a block from a subway station. There was an all-night newsstand across the street. On the corner was La Caridad, the greatest Cuban-Chinese restaurant in the world, or so I told my friends, and I made a religion of it, too.

But my true religious zeal focussed on the Apthorp itself. I honestly believed that at the lowest moment in my adult life I’d been rescued by a building. All right, I’m being melodramatic, but that’s what I believed. I’d left New York City a year earlier to move to Washington, D.C., for what I sincerely thought would be the rest of my life. I’d tried to be cheerful about it. But the horrible reality kept crashing in on me. I would stare out the window of my Washington apartment, which had a commanding view of the lions at the National Zoo. The lions at the National Zoo! Oh, the metaphors of captivity that leaped to mind! The lions lived in a large, comfortable space, like me, and had plenty of food, like me. But were they happy? Et cetera. At other times, the old Clairol ad—“If I’ve only one life to live, let me live it as a blonde”—reverberated through my brain, although my version of it had nothing to do with hair color. If I have only one life to live, I thought, self-pityingly, why am I living it here? But then, of course, I would remember why: I was married, and my husband lived in Washington, and I was in love with him, and we had one baby and another on the way.

When my marriage came to an end, I realized that I would no longer have to worry about whether the marginal neighborhood where we lived was ever going to have a cheese store. I would be free to move back to New York City—which was not just the Big Apple but Cheese Central. But I had no hope that I’d find a place to rent that I could afford that had room enough for us all.

When you give up your apartment in New York and move to another city, New York becomes the worst version of itself. Someone I know once wisely said that the expression “It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there” is completely wrong where New York is concerned; the opposite is true. New York is a very livable city. But when you move away and become a visitor the city seems to turn against you. It’s much more expensive (because you have to eat all your meals out and pay for a place to sleep) and much more unfriendly. Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don’t mind this when you live here; it’s part of the caffeinated romance of the city that never sleeps. But when you leave you experience change as a betrayal. You walk up Third Avenue planning to buy a brownie at a bakery you’ve always been loyal to, and the bakery’s gone. Your dry cleaner moves to Florida; your dentist retires; the lady who made the pies on West Fourth Street vanishes; the maître d’ at P. J. Clarke’s quits, and you realize you’re going to have to start from scratch tipping your way into the heart of the cold, chic young woman now at the door. You’ve turned your back for only a moment, and suddenly everything’s different. You were an insider, a native, a subway traveller, a purveyor of tips into the good stuff, and now you’re just another frequent flyer, stuck in a taxi on the Grand Central Parkway as you wing in and out of LaGuardia. Meanwhile, you read that Manhattan rents are going up, they’re climbing higher, they’ve reached the stratosphere. It seems that the moment you left town they put up a wall around the place, and you will never manage to vault over it and get back into the city again. The apartment in the Apthorp seemed like an urban miracle. I’d found a haven. And the architecture of the building added to the illusion.

The Apthorp, which was built in 1908 by the Astor family, is twelve stories high and the size of a full city block. From the street, it’s lumpen, Middle European, and solid as a tanker, but its core is a large courtyard with two marble fountains and a lovely garden. Enter the courtyard, and the city falls away; you find yourself in the embrace of a beautiful sheltered park. There are stone benches where you can sit in the afternoon as your children run merrily around, ride their bicycles, fight with one another, and threaten to fall into the fountain and drown. In the spring, there are tulips and azaleas, in summer pale-blue hostas and hydrangeas.

Most people who don’t live in New York have no idea that New Yorkers have exactly the same sense of neighborhood that supposedly exists in small-town America; in the Apthorp, this sense is magnified, because the courtyard provides countless opportunities for residents to bump into one another and eventually learn one another’s names. At Halloween, those of us with small children turned the courtyard street lamps into a fantasy of pumpkin-headed ghosts; in December the landlords erected an electric menorah, which coexisted with a Christmas tree covered with twinkle lights.

As it happened, I had several acquaintances who lived in the building, and a few of them became close friends—at least in part because we were neighbors. The man I was seeing, whom I eventually married, managed to tip his way to a lease on a top-floor apartment. My sister Delia and her husband moved into the building; she, too, planned to live there until the day she died. When Delia and I worked together writing movies, it was a simple matter of her coming down from her apartment, crossing the courtyard, and coming up to mine; on rainy days, she could even take an underground route. My friend Rosie O’Donnell took an apartment on the top floor and became so captivated by a doorman named George, who had a big personality, that she booked him onto her talk show. Like most Apthorp doormen, George did not actually open the door—which was, incidentally, a huge, heavy iron gate that you often desperately needed help with—but he did provide a running commentary on everyone who lived in the building, and whenever I came home he filled me in on the whereabouts of my husband, my boys, my babysitter, my sister, my brother-in-law, and even Rosie, who painted her apartment orange, installed walls of shelves for her extensive collection of Happy Meal toys, feuded with her neighbors about her dogs, and fought with the landlords about the fact that her washing machine was somehow irrevocably hooked up to the bathtub drain. Then she moved out. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that anyone would leave the Apthorp voluntarily. I was never going to leave. They will take me out feet first, I said.

Every so often, an ambulance pulled into the courtyard and did take a tenant out feet first, and within minutes the landlords would be deluged with inquiries about a possible vacancy, most of them from tenants who had seen the ambulance come in or out (or had heard about it from George) and wanted to upgrade to a larger space.

At the time I moved in, the Apthorp was owned by a consortium of elderly persons—although, come to think of it, they were not much older than I am now. One of them was a charming, courtly gentleman, active in all sorts of charities involving Holocaust survivors. He lived long enough to be taken to court for a number of things, none of them the crime that I happen to believe he was guilty of, which was lining his pockets with cash payoffs made by people who were either moving in or moving out of the building. I was very fond of him and his sporty red Porsche, which he drove right up to the day he was taken to the hospital. There he took his last kickback, from neighbors of mine, and died. The kickback was part of the two hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars in key money my neighbors had charged a new tenant for the right to take over their lease. That’s right. Someone paid two hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars in key money to move into the Apthorp. How was this possible? What was the thinking? Actually, I could guess: the thinking was that over fifty-six years the two hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars would amortize out to four cappuccinos a day. Grande cappuccinos. Mucho grande cappuccinos.

I lived in the Apthorp in a state of giddy delirium for about ten years. The water in the bathtub often ran brown, there was probably asbestos in the radiators, and the exterior of the building was encrusted with soot. Also, there were mice. Who cared? My rent slowly inched up—the Rent Guidelines Board allowed increases of around eight per cent every two years—but the apartment was still a bargain. By this time, the real-estate boom had begun in New York, and the newspapers were full of shocking articles about escalating rents; there were one-room apartments in Manhattan renting for two thousand dollars a month. I was paying the same amount for eight rooms. I felt like a genius.

Meanwhile, there were unhappy tenants in the building, suing the landlords over various grievances; I couldn’t imagine why. What did they want? Service? A paint job every so often? The willing replacement of a broken appliance? There were even residents who complained about the fact that the building didn’t allow your Chinese food to be brought up to your apartment. So what? Every time I walked into the courtyard at the end of the day, I fell in love all over again.

My feelings were summed up perfectly by a policeman who turned up one night to handle an altercation on my floor. My next-door neighbor was a kind and pleasant professor, the sort of man who would not hurt a flea; his son often left his bicycle in the vestibule outside our apartment. A neighbor down the hall, an accountant, became angry about the professor’s son’s bicycle, which he apparently thought was an eyesore, and it probably was. One afternoon, he decided to put it directly in front of the professor’s door, blocking it. The professor found the bike there and returned it to its spot in the hallway. The accountant put it back in front of the door, once again blocking it. There was quite a lot of noisy crashing about while all this was going on, and it got my attention; as a result, I was lurking at my front door, peeking out into the vestibule, when the final chapter of the drama occurred.

The professor had just put the bicycle back out in the hall, and he, too, was waiting inside his front door hoping to catch the accountant in the act of once again moving it. Both of us stood there idiotically looking through the sheer curtains on our glass-panelled front doors. Sure enough, the accountant came down the hall and moved the bicycle so that it blocked the professor’s door. At that moment, the professor flung his door open and began shouting at the accountant, whom, incidentally, he towered over. Within seconds, he lost it completely and slugged the accountant. It was incredibly exciting. The accountant called the police. The police arrived in short order. Since I, owing to my nosiness, had been a witness to the incident, I invited myself to the meeting with the police and my neighbors. The meeting took place in the professor’s rent-stabilized apartment, which had even more bedrooms than mine. Each man told his version of events, and then I told mine. I have to say that mine was the best version, since it included a short, extremely insightful, and probably completely irrelevant digression about the impatience that childless people have for people with children (and bicycles). You had to be there. Anyway, when we were all finished one of the policemen shook his head and stood up. “Why can’t you people get along?” he said as he headed for the door. “I would kill to live in this building.”

Eventually, I began to have a recurring dream about the Apthorp—or, to be accurate, a recurring nightmare. I dreamed I had accidentally moved out of the building, realized it was the worst mistake of my life, and couldn’t get my lease back. I have had enough psychoanalysis to know not to take such dreams literally, but it’s nonetheless amazing to me that, when my unconscious mind searched for a symbol of what I would most hate to lose, it came up with my apartment.

Around 1990, rumors began to spread that there was about to be a change in the rent laws: under certain circumstances, rent stabilization could be abolished, and landlords would be able to raise rents to something known as fair-market value. I refused to pay any attention. My neighbors were obsessed with what might happen; they suggested that our rents might be raised to eight or ten thousand dollars a month. I thought that they were being unbelievably neurotic. Rent stabilization was an indelible part of New York life, like Gray’s Papaya. It would never be tampered with. I was willing to concede (well, not too willing) that under certain circumstances there might be some justice in the new law; I could understand that you could make a case (a weak case) that people like me had been getting away with a form of subsidized housing for years; I could see (dimly) that the landlords were entitled to something. But I was sure that if our rents were raised the hike would be a reasonable one. After all, the tenants in the building were a family. The landlords understood that. They would never do anything so unreasonable as to double or triple our rents. This moment of innocence on my part was comparable to the moment—early in all love stories that end badly—when a wife discovers the faintest whiff of another woman’s perfume on her husband’s shirt, decides it’s nothing, and goes blithely about her business. I went blithely about my business. And then the building hired a manager named Barbara Ross.

Miss Ross was a small, frightening woman with pale-white skin, bright-red lips, and a huge, jet-black beehive of hair on top of her head. The beehive was so outsized and bizarre that it reminded me of the nineteen-fifties urban legend about the woman who teased her hair so much that cockroaches moved in. Her voice dripped honey, which made her even more terrifying. She was either forty years old or seventy, no one knew. She wore pink silk shantung suits with gigantic shoulder pads. She lurked everywhere. She lived in New Jersey, but she spent Thursday nights in the building office, and rumor had it that she sneaked around in her bare feet, trying to catch the elevator operators napping. She issued memos discouraging children from playing ball in the courtyard. She repaved the courtyard and covered the cobblestones with tar. She had a way of coming upon you in the hallway and making you feel guilty even if you were entirely innocent. She was, in short, a character from a nightmare, so much so that she instantly became a running character in mine: I began to dream that I had accidentally moved out of the Apthorp, realized it was the worst mistake of my life, and couldn’t get my lease back because of Miss Ross.

Meanwhile, the unthinkable happened. The state legislature passed a luxury-decontrol law stating that any tenant whose rent was more than two thousand dollars a month and who earned more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year would automatically be removed from rent stabilization. I was stunned. I could understand the new law applying to new tenants, but how on earth could it apply to those of us who had lived in the building for years under the implicit bargain involved in rent stabilization? I had never gotten a paint job from the building, I’d never even asked for one, and now the landlords were about to treat me as if I were living in a luxury apartment. It was totally unfair! It was completely unjust! It was wrong! It was practically unconstitutional! It was also, of course, not remotely compelling to anyone in the outside world. I made a very decent living. I was going to have my rent raised. What’s more, as far as I knew, I was going to be the first person in the building to undergo the experience. And no one cared. Even I wouldn’t have cared if I hadn’t been me. On the other hand, I wasn’t exactly me. I was in love. I was a true believer, just like one of those French villagers in the Middle Ages who come to believe they’ve seen the tears of St. Cecilia on a scrap of oilcloth; I was a character in a story about mass delusion and the madness of crowds. I was, in short, completely nuts.

And so I went to see Miss Ross. As I recall, I gave a tender speech about my love for the building. It was fantastically moving, if not to her. She informed me that my rent was going to be tripled. We negotiated. She dropped the price. She dropped it just enough for me to believe that I had managed a small victory. How much did she drop it to? I can’t possibly tell you. I’m too embarrassed to type the number. Even if I assured you that in the context of New York rents it wasn’t that outrageous, you’d never believe me. The point is, I agreed to pay it. I signed a new lease.

I signed because I had enough money to pay the rent but not nearly enough to buy an apartment nearly as nice anywhere in the city.

I signed because my accountant was able, in that way accountants have, to persuade me that the money I would pay in rent was less than I would pay in monthly maintenance plus mortgage interest on a co-op apartment.

I signed because I was, as you already know, an expert in rationalization, and I convinced myself that there were huge savings involved in my staying in the building. The cost of moving, for instance. The cost of new telephone service. The cost of the postage required to notify my friends that I would be living at a new address. The cost of furniture, in case I needed new furniture for the apartment I hadn’t found and wasn’t moving into. The hours and days and possibly even weeks of my time that would be wasted trying to reach the cable company—during which time I might instead write a great novel and earn a small fortune that would more than pay for the rent increase.

But, as I said, this isn’t a story about money. This is a story about love. I signed the lease because I wasn’t ready to get a divorce from my building.

Many years ago, when I was in analysis, my therapist used to say, “Love is homesickness.” What she meant was that you tend to fall in love with someone who reminds you of one of your parents. This, of course, is one of those things that analysts always say, even though it isn’t really true. Just about anyone on the planet is capable of reminding you of something about one of your parents, even if it’s only a dimple. But I don’t mean to digress. The point I want to make is that love may or may not be homesickness, but homesickness is definitely love.

My apartment in the Apthorp was really the only space that my children and I had ever lived in together. Since the day we moved in, we had never locked the door. It was the place where Max got his head stuck in a cake pan and Jacob learned to tie his shoelaces. My husband, Nick, and I were married there, in front of the nonworking living-room fireplace. It was a symbol of family. It was an emblem of the moment in my life when my luck changed. It was part of my identity—or, at least, part of my wishful thinking about my identity. Because it was on the unfashionable West Side, just living there made me feel virtuous and brainy. Because it was a rental, it made me feel unpretentious. Because it was shabby, it made me feel chic. In short, it was home in a profound, probably narcissistic, and, I suspect, all too typical way, and it seemed to me that no place on earth would ever feel the same.

The whammies began to mount up. A mysterious dead body was found on the roof of the building. One of the apartments caught fire. An apartment on the eleventh floor was robbed, and the housekeeper was assaulted.

And then truly shocking things began to happen. The landlords cleaned the building! The landlords, who had basically done nothing to the building since we moved in, sandblasted the soot from the exterior, replaced pipes, redid the elevators, and painted the elevator and lobby ceilings gold. They dressed the building employees in braid-trimmed uniforms with epaulets; the staff began to look like a Hispanic version of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The senior landlord, a man named Nason Gordon, removed the mailbox from the building entrance and replaced it with a large marble statue of a naked woman, which the tenants instantly christened Our Lady of the Apthorp. He planted horrible white stucco urns outside the entrance, and dotted the courtyard with ludicrous statues of lions. The tenants experienced all these changes—every last one—as acts of hostility. Clearly, the improvements were being made for one reason and one reason alone—to raise our rents. Which was true; every time the landlords spent money on the building, they trotted off to the Rent Guidelines Board and asked for rent increases based on their expenditures. As a result, more and more tenants lurched toward luxury decontrol and a state of absolute panic. The fear was exacerbated by the fact that the new law made it possible for landlords to be utterly capricious about the increases. After all, what was fair-market value for an eight-room apartment in a city where there were almost no eight-room apartments for rent?

The nineteen-nineties were cresting, and there was a huge amount of money out there in the streets of New York. Empty apartments in the Apthorp were renovated, Miss Ross picked out garish chandeliers for them, and rich tenants moved in. One of the new tenants was actually paying twenty-four thousand dollars a month in rent. Twenty-four thousand dollars a month—and you still couldn’t get the doorman to open the gate or have the Chinese food delivered to you. Rich men getting divorces moved in. Movie stars came and went.

The courtyard, once an idyllic spot full of happy, laughing children, was suddenly crowded with idling limousines waiting for the new tenants to be spirited away to their fabulous midtown careers. Angry tenants waved petitions and legal papers and spread rumors of further impending rent rises.

My lease expired again, and Miss Ross called to tell me that my rent was being raised. The landlords were willing to give me a three-year lease—ten thousand dollars a month the first year, eleven thousand the second, twelve thousand the third. My rent had effectively been raised four hundred per cent in three years.

And, just like that, I fell out of love. Twelve thousand dollars a month is a lot of cappuccino. And guess what? I don’t drink cappuccino. I never have. I called a real-estate broker and began to look at apartments. Unrequited love’s a bore, as Lorenz Hart once wrote. It had taken me significantly longer to come to that realization in the area of real estate than it ever had in the area of marriage, but I was finally, irrevocably there. Since my love affair with the building was one-sided, falling out of love was fairly uncomplicated. My children were grown and unable to voice the sorts of objections they had put forth during early exploratory conversations on the topic of moving, when they implored me not to leave the only home they’d ever known. My husband was up for anything. My sister was already on the street, looking for a new place, my sister—who had been quoted in the Times talking about the “heart and soul” of the Apthorp—was out there, cold-eyed, unsentimental, and threatening to move downtown. I called my accountant, who explained to me (as carefully as he had explained to me only a few years earlier that it made more sense to rent than to buy) that it made more sense to buy than to rent.

So we prepared to move. We threw away whole pieces of our lives: the Care Bears, the wire shelving in the basement storage room, the boxes of bank statements, the posters we hung on the walls when we were young, the stereo speakers that no longer worked, the first computer we ever bought, the snowboard, the surfboard, the drum kit, the Portafiles full of documents relating to movies never made. Boxes of clothing went to charity. Boxes of books went to libraries in homeless shelters. We felt cleansed. We’d got back to basics. We’d been forced to confront what we had outgrown, what we would no longer need, who we were. We had taken stock. It was as if we had died but got to sort through our things; it was as if we’d been reborn and were now able to start accumulating things all over again.

The new place was considerably smaller than the apartment in the Apthorp. It was on the Upper East Side, a neighborhood that on some level I had spent more than twenty years thinking of as the enemy of everything I held dear. It was nowhere near a Cuban-Chinese restaurant. But the fireplace worked, the doorman opened the door, and the Chinese food was delivered to your apartment. Within hours of moving in, I was at home. I was astonished. I was amazed. Most of all, I was mortified. I hadn’t been so mortified since the end of my marriage, and a great many of the things that went through my head apropos of that marriage went through my head now: Why hadn’t I left at the first whiff of the other woman’s perfume? Why hadn’t I realized how much of what I thought of as love was simply my own highly developed gift for making lemonade? What failure of imagination had caused me to forget that life was full of possibilities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?

On the other hand, I am never going to dream about this new apartment of mine.

At least, I haven’t so far.

And I am never going to feel romantic about the neighborhood—although I have to say that it’s much more appealing than I would have guessed. What’s more, it turns out to possess many of the things that made the Apthorp so wildly attractive—proximity to an all-night newsstand, an all-night Korean grocery, and even a twenty-four-hour Kinko’s. It’s spring now, and I can see out the window that the pear trees are in bloom, and they’re just beautiful. And, by the way, shopping for food is every bit as good on this side of town as it was on the West Side, it’s much closer to the airport, the subway is better, and I’ll tell you something else I’ve noticed about the East Side: it’s sunnier, it really is, I don’t know why, the light is just much lighter on the east side of town than the west. What’s more, it’s definitely warmer over here in winter, because it’s farther from the frigid blasts of wind coming off the Hudson River. And it’s much closer to all my doctors’ offices, which is something you have to think about at my age, I’m sorry to say. A block from here is a place that sells the most heavenly Greek yogurt, and a block in another direction is a restaurant I could eat in every night, that’s how good it is.

But it’s not love. It’s just where I live. ♦

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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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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 Hardcover – Deckle Edge, October 29, 2013

A whopping big celebration of the work of the late, great Nora Ephron, America’s funniest—and most acute—writer, famous for her brilliant takes on life as we’ve been living it these last forty years. Everything you could possibly want from Nora Ephron is here—from her writings on journalism, feminism, and being a woman (the notorious piece on being flat-chested, the clarion call of her commencement address at Wellesley) to her best-selling novel, Heartburn, written in the wake of her devastating divorce from Carl Bernstein; from her hilarious and touching screenplay for the movie When Harry Met Sally . . . (“I’ll have what she’s having”) to her recent play Lucky Guy (published here for the first time); from her ongoing love affair with food, recipes and all, to her extended takes on such controversial women as Lillian Hellman and Helen Gurley Brown; from her pithy blogs on politics to her moving meditations on aging (“I Feel Bad About My Neck”) and dying. Her superb writing, her unforgettable movies, her honesty and fearlessness, her nonpareil humor have made Nora Ephron an icon for America’s women—and not a few of its men.

• Print length 576 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Knopf
• Publication date October 29, 2013
• Dimensions 6.65 x 2.17 x 9.49 inches
• ISBN-10 038535083X
• ISBN-13 978-0385350839
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

From publishers weekly, from booklist, from bookforum, about the author.

Nora Ephron was the author of the hugely successful I Feel Bad About My Neck, I Remember Nothing, and Heartburn. She received Academy Award nominations for best original screenplay for When Harry Met Sally . . . , Silkwood, and Sleepless in Seattle, which she also directed. Her other credits include the recent hit play Lucky Guy and the films You’ve Got Mail and Julie & Julia, both of which she wrote and directed. She died in 2012.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; First Edition (October 29, 2013)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 576 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 038535083X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385350839
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.14 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.65 x 2.17 x 9.49 inches
• #552 in American Fiction Anthologies
• #4,776 in Short Stories Anthologies
• #21,982 in Literary Fiction (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.

Customer reviews

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Customers say

Readers find the book enjoyable, delightful, and fantastic. They describe the author as witty, fabulous, and superb. Readers describe the collection as a great, inspiring, and perfect collection of everything Nora Ephron has written. They also find the stories heartwarming, touching, and poignant. Reader also mention the author is talented and wonderful.

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Customers find the book enjoyable, delightful, and fantastic. They say it's compelling from page one and highly recommended. Readers also mention the essays are brilliant and insightful.

"Delightful and very readable ." Read more

"...I read the most of it before passing it on and found it interesting ." Read more

"...We all know it. We've all read her books and seen her movies. This book is great , but it's too big/heavy to read in bed. Sorta disappointed...." Read more

" Enjoyable read " Read more

Customers find the humor in the book clever, witty, and insightful. They also appreciate the brilliant essays and conversational style.

"...Her whit and intelligence in her writing is unmatched . I laugh out loud at her musings and find myself missing her voice in the world...." Read more

" Nora Ephron is funny . Because she seeks the truth, after I've stopped laughing, I find myself oddly, deeply affected and a bit teared up...." Read more

"As you’d expect from Nora Ephron, this is a witty book . I bought a copy for myself and a second one to give away. It’s delightful!" Read more

"...myself in her brilliant, biting, insightful, sharp witted and intelligent writing ...." Read more

Customers find the collection of Nora Ephron's writings great, inspiring, and perfect. They also say it did a good job of presenting her writings in a chronological order.

"...She left us too soon, so I'm glad I got this great, big fat compendium of her work from the many facets of her life--newspaper and magazine..." Read more

"...This book is a wonderful collection of Nora's work , and since there will be no more from her, it is to be treasured and read over and over...." Read more

"...This book did a good job of presenting her writings in a chronological order, emphasizing how the writing matched what was going on in Nora's life..." Read more

"...This collection contains many of her best works , including the script for "When Harry Met Sally." Each of the articles or stories sparkles..." Read more

Customers find the stories in the book heartwarming, touching, and poignant. They say the book will immediately cheer them up and warm their hearts.

"...is a great book for a cold winter night; it will immediately cheer you and warm your heart ." Read more

"Loved it, the essays were heart warming and reflected her incredible humanness. Such a talented lady, great loss that she has left us." Read more

"...I adore and treasure this book! Her stories are heartwarming and wonderful! You need to get this book!" Read more

"This is a compilation of all of her work. Funny, insightful and relatable stories that are so entertaining. We will miss Ms. Ephron and her wry wit." Read more

Customers find the stories in the book insightful, relatable, and entertaining. They also appreciate the fine journalism by an astute writer.

"...Ephron's work is a way to immerse myself in her brilliant, biting, insightful , sharp witted and intelligent writing...." Read more

"...This is not only one very funny lady, but extremely insightful and understanding to boot. The world lost Ms. Ephron when she was only 71...." Read more

"Nora is the best. Full of life, wit and acute observation of those people and times that filled her being." Read more

Customers find the author talented and wonderful. They say the book reflects her incredible humanity.

"...anthology of the author's works-all with highlights and reminders of the author's talent ." Read more

"...She was such a creative and wide ranging talent- this collection is a treasure for me to dip into and reflect upon, laugh over and be surprised anew..." Read more

"Loved it, the essays were heart warming and reflected her incredible humanness . Such a talented lady, great loss that she has left us." Read more

" Talented , funny, Nora Ephrom. I had read most of the articles in this collection, but it's nice to have them all together. Wonderful person...." Read more

Customers find the book creative, incisive, and articulate.

"...Her writing is delightful and incisive . This is a great compilation of her writings on various topics and people and of her novels...." Read more

"A great anthology of her essays, bright, articulate and funny." Read more

Customers find the book a great and fun gift for any reader. They also say it's a light read for those who enjoy humor.

"...A great gift for any reader ." Read more

" Great gift for serious bookworms ..." Read more

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How ‘The Most of Nora Ephron’ Explains America

By Gail Collins June 20, 2023

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The modern women’s movement was so transformative that it’s easy to forget the old days in the 1960s and ’70s, when the other side was good at portraying us as man-hating harpies and it was a challenge to make women feel comfortable being in the fight.

Then we discovered that in this country, a spoonful of humor could help make the message palatable. Enter writers like Nora Ephron, a fighter for the cause who was a genius at using wit to handle any woe.

“ The Most of Nora Ephron ” is a tome that includes so much of what she published, from current affairs journalism to food blogging to Broadway plays. She shows us who we are and how we got there and makes you wish she were still here to write about the future.

Nora came out of the old world; when she was a White House intern, she proudly took her then-fiancé on a tour, and when they came to the end of all the fabulous, historic rooms, he told her , “No wife of mine is going to work in a place like this.” But she figured out how to get around every barrier with humor as her weapon. Her second husband, Carl Bernstein, was the star of a famous Washington sex scandal; she turned her role as betrayed wife into the best-selling novel and movie “Heartburn.”

“The Most” shows Nora’s gift for making the enemies of free speech, reproductive rights and all-purpose social progress look silly. Which, truly, they hate more than anything.

For those of us who knew Nora, the essays are a great reminder of the way she combined a serious attempt to improve the world with dedication to creating the best possible cocktail party. Truly, we want them both. I remember joining her in trying to get deep into “The Golden Notebook,” Doris Lessing’s cerebral feminist novel, and feeling so rewarded when the discussion kinda turned into a celebrity gossip session.

In “The Most,” you’ll find observations on modern life from the personal and pragmatic (“There’s a reason why 40, 50 and 60 don’t look the way they used to, and it’s not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It’s because of hair dye”) to the very political. “I hope that you choose not to be a lady,” she told the 1996 graduates at her alma mater, Wellesley. “I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.”

“The Most of Nora Ephron” is certainly not all about politics, and you may find some opinions you disagree with — pretty impossible to have as many as she did and not come up with a conflict or two.

But it never dwindles. It ends in two lists: “What I Won’t Miss” and “What I Will Miss.” The things she knew she’d miss range from her kids and her husband Nick Pileggi to “Pride and Prejudice” and pie. The stuff she wouldn’t includes bills, email and — talk about a woman ahead of her time — Clarence Thomas.

Humor is a great coping mechanism, sure. And coping mechanisms are important; you have to survive the present before you can build the future. But “The Most” is a reminder that it’s also a political strategy. Pointing out how ridiculous the status quo is breaks its spell and gives us the freedom to dream up something better. Imagine what she’d say now about library book banning or the latest abortion battle or — oh, wow — the governor of Florida’s war on Disney.

Scroll for more tv shows , movies , books and songs that explain America.

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Illustrations by Braulio Amado

Illustration source photographs David Brooks: Douglas Sacha, Brett Taylor and Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images

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10 great essays and articles by nora ephron, on maintenance, a few words about breasts, the graduate, i remember nothing, be the heroine of your life, my life as an heiress, moving on, a love story, my mother’s mink coat, the lost strudel, 150 great articles and essays.

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10 Best Nora Ephron Books (2024)

Ephron was the type of writer who apparently couldn’t stop creating hit stories. She was born in 1941 and died in 2012 from leukemia but managed to write many thrilling books and screenplays. She was an excellent journalist, writer, filmmaker, and much more.

Many of Nora’s works were more than worthy of getting nominated for and winning tons of awards such as the Academy Award for Best Writing, the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay, a Tony Award nomination for Best Play, and so on.

Best Nora Ephron Books

Famous works.

Some of the most famous and best Nora Ephron books you can read right now include I Feel Bad About My Neck, Heartburn, I Remember Nothing, Crazy Salad, and more. She is also very well known for her success in film as some of her most famous works in this field include Silkwood, Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally, and a few more.

Here are 10 of the most popular Ephron books to keep you entertained and allow you to get to know this amazing author and her brilliant writing style. Waiting for you inside are mesmerizing stories, unforgettable characters, a lot of drama, and much more.

I Feel Bad About My Neck

Autobiography.

There couldn’t be a better book to start with if you want to learn all there is about Nora as a person and writer. If you’re planning to read Nora Ephron’s books in order, this one might not be the first one she published but it’s the best one to start with. That’s because this book contains her autobiography.

All About Nora

The contents of the book feature stories from her life, thoughts on various things, and similar topics. It’s the perfect collection of almost everything Nora hates, loves, admires, and much more. This is the reason why this is the best book to start with if you haven’t read any other books written by Nora Ephron. You get to meet her and find out what she’s like as a person. After that, everything nonfiction or fiction that she writes is going to make much more sense.

A Little Bit of Everything

The reason that this book managed to become one of the most exciting and nationally best-selling Ephron books is that the contents inside don’t just create any old boring autobiography about the author’s life. No, she has managed to turn this book into a laugh-out-loud story that features many memorable characters and events. There’s no doubt that you’re going to have a blast with this one and you’ll become a real Ephron fan in no time.

Here it is, the first fiction novel that we have to offer. Heartburn is a wonderful story that features romance, drama, thrill, and food. Yes, food! At some points, you’re going to feel like you’re reading the most interesting cookbook in the world as there are some very delicious recipes hidden inside. Heartburn is a strong competitor for being the best Nora Ephron book ever.

The Star of the Show

One of the main, and most exciting, characters who you’re going to be reading about is Rachel Samstat. Oh, and Mark, but we don’t like Mark. You’ll find out why as you read on. So, Rachel is in her seventh month of pregnancy when she discovers the last thing she would wish at that certain period of her life. Here comes the part when you start hating Mark.

It turns out that Mark, her husband, is actually in love with another woman. This other woman was no pretty sight and nothing to take your breath away, but Mark was still in love with her. We don’t want to spoil all the fun in our Nora Ephron book review so you get to find out how that whole story goes on your own.

When Does the Food Arrive?

Oh yes, we can’t forget the most delicious part of the story. In the middle of all the drama that is being thrown around, Rachel shows everyone a few of her most mouth-watering recipes. She writes cookbooks for a living so why not learn how to make a delicious meal or two while you’re at it?

I Remember Nothing

More about nora.

When you first have a look at this book by Nora, it has a slight resemblance to her other work titled I Feel Bad About My Neck. Well, this one is another nonfiction book with stories from her life and can easily be Nora Ephron’s best book for many of her fans. Every true Ephron fan knows that you can never have enough stories from her personal experiences through life.

In this book, you get to hear more stories that she didn’t have time to mention in her previous memoir. There are plenty of exciting career stories inside as well as some love tales to keep all of you romantics interested.

Stories and Insights

The book is all fun as you get to read a bunch of her most interesting stories and events that she lived through. But, on top of that, you also get to learn a lot from Ephron’s books. Her stories are warm, insightful, and delightful to hear. Another thing that you’ll never forget are tales in which she was already diagnosed with her disease and knew what was waiting for her.

Despite all that, Nora still remained a kind person who taught others until the end of her days. Nora is a person you want to look up to and someone who just feels amazing to read about.

When Harry Met Sally

Who are harry and sally.

When Harry Met Sally is one of Nora Ephron’s best books, and you’ll be happy to know that this one is an amazing fictional story about the search for happiness in an American city where things are nothing if not memorable and exciting.

As you might have guessed already, the main characters in this book that turned into one of the most amazing romantic comedy movies of all time are Harry Burns and Sally Albright. The story starts with these two as they have just graduated from the University of Chicago and are sharing a drive to New York City together. This drive is the beginning of the wonderful story that follows and the start of another amazing book.

Fast-Forward

After getting to know the main characters, the story jumps five years into their lives. At first, these two hated each other but later something started to change. From the reader’s perspective, it might be obvious that they have a certain chemistry between them but they didn’t seem to be aware of it until a certain event reveals their true feelings.

You can expect tons of misunderstandings, lots of laughs, some very romantic moments, a lot of drama, and pure excitement until the end of the story. It won’t take long for you to realize why this is one of the best-selling Nora Ephron books of all time. And, lucky for you, if this story is not enough you still get to watch the movie version of it.

Wallflower at the Orgy

Wonderful collection.

Before you come to any conclusions, this is not a story about an actual orgy, as many have assumed. No, this is even better. This is a wonderful collection of writings that Nora worked on during the last three years of the 1960s. The collection features stories and topics about popular culture at that time.

A Great Combination

Ephron always manages to turn any story into an eye-catching chunk of excitement. Although this book doesn’t feature any fictional characters and events, you’re still going to be glad you got to read what’s inside.

The title of the book is especially interesting as it comes from a saying that Nora used to mention a lot. She constantly said that she was always standing on the side taking notes while everyone else was having fun as a group.

Fashion, People, and New York City

The things she says and writes inside this book are unlikely to withstand the test of time, but what she talks about is still very exciting to read about. She gives her the most honest opinions on the most popular things of that time, the most famous people, certain fashion looks, and much more.

The Most of Nora Ephron

It’s no wonder that Nora’s fictional stories are worthy of turning into huge movies and you get to find out the best of those from our list of Nora Ephron’s books, but before you know it, another one of her nonfiction works comes up presented in the form of another memoir. This is an amazing book that showcases a few more exciting events from her life that you simply can’t be without.

Nora Ephron 101

Sometimes, it gets more exciting to read about Nora’s life than her many memorable fictional stories and characters. If there’s one thing that this author can do, it’s making you smile and have a great time with any of her tales. Her wit and humorous writing style are a few of the main things her fans simply can’t let go of and can never have enough of.

A Treasure of Writings

The great thing about this book is that you always know where you are. The writings are laid out in chronological order and there is quite a lot to discover as well. From her opinions on journalism and her career to movie scripts, it’s all in there. For all of the fans of her book Heartburn, one of the best Ephron novels ever, there’s a very special surprise waiting for you inside.

Crazy Salad

Here’s another book by Nora that everyone can’t seem to stop talking about. It’s one of the best-rated Ephron books as the contents inside are very appealing to many of her readers. Here’s what you can expect from Crazy Salad. For starters, the name of the book suggests quite a lot and if we’d have to list Nora Ephron’s books ranked, this one would be somewhere at the top.

A Mixture of Everything

Much of the content is related to her opinions and thoughts about women at the time she lived in. There are quite a lot of short stories inside that talk about different things as well. Another great thing about Nora is that she never shies away from talking about herself. What she’s trying to say about women she often includes in her descriptions.

No Self-Consciousness Here

The first of the stories you get to read inside this book is called A Few Words About Breasts. This story is all it takes to get you hooked on the following contents of the book. This author was never afraid to talk about herself and state some obvious problems she had with herself. On top of talking about her, and women’s looks, she also has a few things to say about politics, beauty products, and more.

Love, Loss and What I Wore

Simple, yet mind-boggling.

How can Nora discuss so similar topics in so many of her nonfiction books and yet still get more and more exciting to read? This is one of those things where you either have it or you don’t. Lots of Nora Ephron book reviews show that she definitely has it. Anyway, in this book, she focuses on topics such as women, of course, clothes, prom dresses, mothers, buying bras, and other simple yet very mind-boggling things like these.

A Book Full of Memories

This is exactly what this book is, a collection of short stories that are from Nora’s past. It’s nearly impossible not to get moved by the things she says inside and the memories she shares with her readers. From what you’ll gather inside, it won’t take a lot to make you think that this book is the best Nora Ephron novel for students as there are many insightful things for persons of that age.

Attachment to Clothes

Much of the book is related to Nora’s clothes. This may sound silly but it’s not rare to see someone get attached to an object and simply experience a tsunami of emotions, nostalgia, and memories every time they look at that object. This is what’s happening to Nora and you get to see what she sees in situations like this through one of the best books by Ephron ever.

Scribble, Scribble

Collection of columns.

This is another collection-styled book by Nora in which we get to read some of her old stuff. You may know all of Ephron’s screenwriting books and her best-selling fiction stories , but this book contains a collection of columns that Nora wrote for Esquire Magazine back from 1975 to 1977.

A Woman With Many Opinions

This author sure did know a lot about a variety of topics as we can see from many novels by Nora Ephron. Despite talking a lot about women and herself, she also knew and had many opinions on topics such as the media and journalism.

These are the two subjects that she mainly discusses in this book. She shares her knowledge about the subject through the 24 articles printed inside. There’s even one article that was refused by Esquire and was never published. You get to see why.

Detailed View on Journalism

This is exactly what you get to read in most of the columns inside. Nora puts many topics and people under the microscope and starts examining them one by one. So, if you want to see what journalism was like during the seventies, and you also want to have a good laugh then this is one of the top Ephron books to get the job done.

Imaginary Friends

Enjoy it while it lasts as this is the last book we have to review here. If you’re planning to read Nora Ephron’s book in order, this isn’t her last book, it’s just the last, but not least, from our review.

This is Nora’s version of the story of the feud between American playwright Lillian Hellman and novelist Mary McCarthy. Mary managed to greatly embarrass Hellman on public television so their feud was something to remember as it all ended with Hellman’s death.

Nora’s Version

In Nora’s version of this event, she creates a fictional story in which she brings these two characters back to life in one of the most hilarious and memorable plays yet. This was an event that happened quite a while ago but it doesn’t mean that you won’t have fun with the book even if you don’t have a clue who Hellman and McCarthy were.

Second Chance

As Nora decides to give these two very verbal women a second chance, she doesn’t change their personalities. She merely tries to imagine what it would be like if they had one more meeting together.

What you’re about to see is a series of very strong verbal attacks at each other that are going to make you laugh out loud. These two characters easily make this one of the best Nora Ephron books that no one can complain about.

Alissa Wynn

Alissa is an avid reader, blogger, and wannabe writer. (She's a much better cook than a writer actually). Alissa is married, has one human, one feline, and two canine kids. She always looks a mess and never meets a deadline.