So, I called my mom. What else was there to do?
Screams, shrieks, and great sighs of sorrow. (And validation for my own deep pit of the heart emotion felt).
My dad, yelling from the other room, said, "Oh, did someone die?" Upon finding it it was "just" Nora Ephron, he was only blandly annoyed. Benign at best. "I wanna go to sleep."
But us women, and the men among us who have worked with her like Tom Hanks, Steve Martin and Billy Crystal, all have expressed their deep gutteral pangs of sorrow. Nora Ephron was a giant. A great of our time. She could write, sure, but she was more than just a writer. She was the voice of women, crossing generational gaps.
Is it coincidence or not that just a few weeks ago at my local JCC I picked up an original copy of her 1971 book Crazy Salad, complete with yellowed pages and falling-apart spine. I wasn't terribly impressed by the writing, her being somewhat early in her career. It wasn't as witty and sharp as I loved in Heartburn. Last week I ordered her latest book from the library I Remember Nothing, thinking I am two years behind schedule with reading one of the funniest, wittiest, smartest women of our time. I even as recently as a couple of weeks ago tweeted her sister Delia, as I have ramped up my Twitter life and searching for those folks important to me such as Nora Ephron only to find her not on Twitter, but Delia is also a great woman and tweeted me back.
Nora Ephron could write, boy could she write. Always a source of inspiration: everything is copy, she said famously. Wanting so much to emulate her style, Nora has often been a lurking existence in my brain.
May her memory be a blessing, and may we continue to use her writing as fuel for all of our inklings to be go-getters. She was one of those rare gems and will be tremendously missed.
In lieu of me being able to write anything good, here is a great piece, remembering Nora. I am certain we will be flooded in the next day or three.
I thank my sister Reba for reminding me about this scene, which, when I first saw it in high school in 1989 was completely mind-blowing and truth-revealing. At the time, I just wanted to be friends with my junior prom date, a nice, good guy who I simply wasn't attracted to and couldn't view as a boyfriend. I couldn't understand why the feeling wasn't mutual until I saw this scene, which explained it all.
