nora

everything is copy

Aug 06, 2024

In fifth grade1 I was invited to a friend’s birthday party where the activity was watching You’ve Got Mail at the theater. Why a bunch of 11 year olds wanted to see a movie where they’d get like 15% of the material I have no answer for but it left an indelible mark on me. Now, I know this movie by heart and declare it to be the best romantic comedy film for so many reasons. It’s so fucking charming! Bookstores! Enemies to lovers! Meg’s haircut2! The soundtrack! Parker Posey and Steve Zahn and baby Chris Messina! Greg Kinnear’s nonsensical diatribes! Earworm lines like: “happy Thanksgiving back” or “TALL DECAF CAPPUCCINO” or “That caviar is a garnish!” or “Thank your” or “Quel nightmare”. Just imagine my delight when I got my own job at a small niche bookstore!3

Nora Ephron was the writer and director of YGM and before she gave us her rom-com treasures4 she was an accomplished journalist, columnist and essayist. While following my curiosity recently, I came across a 2022 New Yorker article which explores the misguided tendency people have to soften or overly romanticize Nora and blunt her uniquely caustic quality because she was known for romances. “Transforming Ephron into a cuddly heroine, a figure of mood and atmosphere, obscures the artist whose interest, above all, was in verbal precision.” I spy an example of diminishing stories of love, romance and ‘women’s fiction’ which I think is done to the detriment of all. Nora’s verbal wizardry is exacting, beautiful, entertaining and laudable. “But this is Ephron’s version of movie magic: a world in which words are so important that you can fall for your enemy just because he knows how to use them.” The article goes on to explain that “Ephron’s romances are physically chaste but rhetorically hot.” and involve “swooning over someone’s syntax”. These are spot-on descriptions5 and why I continually revisit the epistolary flirtations of enemies to lovers Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox as well as the grumpy/sunshine snarky banter of Harry and Sally. The words!

One of Nora’s most famous quotes comes from her mother: ‘everything is copy’. She took this to mean: “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.” This is also the title of her son’s documentary about her which came out in 2015, three years after her death at the age of 71 from leukemia. I’ve lately been fascinated by Nora, not a little by how mean and comedically cutting she was6 ; but also by her singular combination7 of loyalty, kindness8, braininess, incisive wordsmithing and unsolicited advice. As Meg Ryan astutely observes in the documentary: “Her allegiance to language was sometimes more than her allegiance to someone’s feelings.” I find this ‘verbal precision’ appealing and should like to borrow a few doses of it myself. There is only one Nora, but I’m drawn this type of cleverly cutting writing voice and see some of it in Sloane Crosley, Madeleine Gray’s Green Dot9, Patricia Lockwood10 and Caroline O'Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident11.

Of course not everything is copy; Nora herself kept her terminal cancer diagnosis a secret from almost everyone she knew. But this attitude, this approach is something I want to keep in mind. That I cannot control events12 but I can control13 my reaction to events; my attitude, approach, response and the narrative I choose to communicate said events to myself and to others. To bring a keen observer’s eye, to examine and to find the power and connection that storytelling provides. I’m hoping this will be a mantra when life goes awry. This is not by any means a Pollyanna-ish mindset14, but more a hope in dark times that ‘this will make a good story someday’ and to reap perspective and harvest laughs because aren’t failures, faults and foibles where the best stories lie?

This week’s shelf contains Nora’s only novel and two homages to her screenplays. Don’t sleep on Nora’s essay collections though. “I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman” and “I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections” are witty and wise with ample lol moments.

You’ll read what I’m reading so pick up one of these if you want to escape to the Nora-verse.

HEARTBURN by Nora Ephron

Rachel Samstat is a wife, mother and successful cookbook author who has just discovered that her husband has been cheating on her for a while. She is also seven months pregnant. Her world overturned, she seeks consolation and commiseration from family, friends and food. This is fiction but inspired by events in Nora’s own life15 and is a fantastic example of the power in reclaiming and narrating one’s own story in a quite public and lucrative form of payback.

But the story I'm telling here began the day I discovered the affair between Mark and Thelma, and it ended exactly six weeks later. It has a happy ending, but that's because I insist on happy endings; I would insist on happy beginnings, too, but that's not necessary because all beginnings are intrinsically happy, in my opinion. What about middles, you may ask. Middles are a problem. Middles are perhaps the major problem of contemporary life.

This is a perfectly seasoned, salty/sweet afternoon snack of a book at 180 pages. Adorably haphazard and acerbically voiced, this is light on plot and has only splashes of emotionality; however it is snappy, irreverent and thrillingly petty in its language as one would expect from Nora. It is presented almost like a long, overdue catch-up session with a friend full of meandering tangents, stories, diatribes, asides and meal descriptions; written so naturally conversational that you can almost see looks exchanged. I chuckled out loud many times16 at its language and tonal shifts that range from the snappy and sweet, the weird and daydreamy and the crass and melancholic. Our narrator is blindsided yet comedic as she is simultaneously devastated and thrilled to be living through this dramatic betrayal which allows her to wallow, wail, drown in mashed potatoes and flee to the “bagel haven” of NYC.

Here's how you make a four-minute egg: Put an egg into cold water and bring it to the boil. Turn off the heat immediately and put the lid on the saucepan. Let it sit. In three minutes, you will have a perfect four-minute egg. It just so happens that the world is not waiting breathlessly for a three-minute way to make a four-minute egg, but sometimes, when you are a food person, the possible irrelevance of what you are doing doesn't cross your mind until it's too late.

There are recipes scattered throughout the text as almost conversational afterthoughts and not formatted any differently. These range from sorrel soup to bacon hash to key lime pie to her plot point of a vinaigrette.

At one point over the weekend Mark asked me how I made my vinaigrette, but I wouldn't tell him. I figured my vinaigrette was the only thing I had that Thelma didn't (besides a pregnancy), and I could just see him learning it from me and then rushing over to her house with a jar of Grey Poupon mustard (the essential ingredient) and teaching her the wrist movement and dancing off into a sunset of arugola salads.

I must seem to be putting too much emphasis on this vinaigrette of mine, but war is war.

Note that this was published in 1983 so is definitely a product of its time with a few highly suspect word choices (especially regarding marginalized communities), excessive use of sour cream, commuting via The Eastern Shuttle and some name dropping that went right over my head.

Two of us liked dark meat and two of us liked light meat and together we made a chicken.

Extra Credit: There’s a movie version written by Nora and directed by Mike Nichols that stars Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. I haven’t had luck finding it streaming though and would LOVE to get it from my library should it EVER COME BACK. 17

THE UNDERTAKING OF HART AND MERCY by Megan Bannen

In a bizarre and colorful fantasy world, Mercy runs her family’s undertaking business practically all by herself which is getting pretty old. Hart is a lonely marshal who patrols Tanria, a dangerous and magical realm that I fear to explain to you because its so weird it may turn you off. Ever since their ill-fated meeting a few years back, Hart and Mercy bring out the worst in each other despite their mutual attraction. They trade barbs, insults and end up violently bickering whenever their careers cause their paths to cross. Classic. When Hart reaches a low point and sends an unsigned letter into the void addressed to A Friend, Mercy receives it and replies anonymously. As their secret pen-palship continues, resulting in true feelings, Hart eventually discovers Mercy is his epistolary crush which throws everything into chaos. Or does it? Can enemies ever become lovers!?

This aces the assignment. It is light, silly, sweet and sexy and its truly weird world adds that extra jolt of creativity as it hits all the notes you want in a You’ve Got Mail inspired romantasy. Its humor can be a tad juvenile and simplistic, but the secret letter writing combined with enemies to lovers trope is so fun and engaging that I (mostly) forgive it. And who among us does not love the first face to face meetup scene from You’ve Got Mail when Tom Hanks knows Meg Ryan is Shopgirl but she does not know he is NY152? The banter is Simone level gold. This book has its own version of that juicy interaction which is fizzy and endlessly enjoyable. The language here is nowhere near Nora’s skill level, but the story beats inspired by YGM are fun and enticing while the additions of spiciness and a unique setting make this an easy one to recommend.

“It annoyed Mercy to no end that after years of putting up with that insufferable marshal, some primal inner instinct continued to think he looked good enough to eat.”

YOU, AGAIN by Kate Goldbeck

In this gender-swapped take on When Harry Met Sally, free spirited comedian Ari and Type A chef Josh have a few meet not-cutes over the years while each is in their own situation-ship and discover a mutual disdain for the other. These encounters are full of squabbles, quips, narrowed eyes, clenched jaws and begrudging frissons of attraction. A handful of years later they are both nursing broken hearts and decide to be “friends in misery”; to whine, mope and commiserate about their singledom together. As their friendship grows and morphs into something neither expected, Ari and Josh must confront the narratives, choices and boxes they’ve created for themselves to see whether real love is in the cards for them or if they are destined to be alone and unloved forever.

I already mentioned this one as one of my favorite reads of 2023, but am reminding you about it here because its hot and delightful.18 This was consistently funny, sexy and had a winning supporting cast along with its charmingly dopey mains. Ari and Josh’s friendship is electric; the banter is droll, the comebacks are witty and their connection is sweet. I especially enjoyed the physicality the author included as it really made the scenes come alive, almost cinematically. The POV19 shifts multiple times within chapters which keeps the pace and tension alive as you continually get the chance to be inside each character’s head, enhancing the emotional connection and comedy. Similar to the iconic fake orgasm scene from the film, there are a few amusing shenanigan scenes20 that genuinely made me laugh aloud. Also, I love a rom-com where each character needs to do some serious inner work throughout their arc and when the right character does the big, climactic, public, groveling love declaration.21

It’s got some cheeky modern updates of a few of When Harry Met Sally’s iconic scenes: meeting through a mutual friend/crush they promptly forget exists, the lines “I’ll have what she’s having” and “Someone is staring at you in Personal Growth”, New Years Eve and the list of idiosyncrasies as a love declaration. Spot any others?

Oh! If you look real close, you’ll notice Adam Driver on the cover!22 But seriously, its a great, poppy cover that is reminiscent of this scene.

“You’re the only person I’m nice to. If you weren’t around, I’d have no redeeming qualities.”