Ode to Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron is and will always be, one of my personal heroes, second only to my mom. Which I think Nora would understand.
I first watched You’ve Got Mail in my Junior year at my small liberal arts college in St. Augustine, FL. By the end, I was ready to hop on a plane and move to New York City. I had never really seen a movie that felt like it was for me in a way that You’ve Got Mail did. I was completely in awe of how sweet and effortlessly funny it was. I just thought to myself, I want to watch this over and over. Even though the movie is from 1998, it felt like it was for me in a way a lot of other movies weren’t. I needed more.
Naturally, I found my way to When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle. It was then that I truly recognized the magic that was Nora Ephron. You can hear her voice in each and every screenplay. She knew how to write funny, but she also knew how to write about love in a way that was earnest. You rooted for her characters to find love because they felt so real, you wanted the best for them like you would your own friends. She wrote comedic, three-dimensional female protagonists, and dynamic male protagonists that someone would actually want to be with. Not what male screenwriters believed female audiences wanted out of a romantic lead. Her female characters weren’t assigned random quirks like in a lot of Rom-Coms nowadays (yes I’m looking at you, Netflix’s Christmas Rom-Com, Love Hard. You know I’m talking about Nina Dobrev’s narratively unnecessary allergy to Kiwi! Which by the way isn’t even a Christmas fruit, but I digress).
Nora’s characters were these multi-dimensional women who knew what they wanted. They were unapologetically themselves, in the 80s and 90s nonetheless, when women who said what they wanted were considered, “difficult.” The more I learned about Nora as a person, from reading old articles, watching YouTube interviews, and eventually viewing the documentary made by her son, Everything is Copy, I saw how these characters were all her in one way or another.
To this day, Julie and Julia is my favorite film. In my eyes, it’s a perfect film. If you don’t know, Julie and Julia follows Julia Child (Merly Streep) and her journey to becoming a famous cook paralleled with the story of a young woman, Julie (Amy Adams), at a crossroads in her life who decides she’s going to make every single recipe in Julia Child’s cookbook. This movie has everything I love: strong female leads, two beautiful love stories, cooking, humor, Paris in the 50s, and Stanley Tucci. I need to put it out there that I was a Tucci fan before everyone else hopped on the Tucc-bandwagon.
I’m late to the party when it comes to a lot of things though. It took me way too long to discover her novel, Heartburn, which I discovered deep in my Nora phase. The novel is pretty solidly based on her real-life ex-husband Carl Bernstein’s affair and was adapted into a movie in 1986. The movie Heartburn was Nora’s debut as a screenwriter, and the novel Heartburn was her first and last piece of “literary fiction” although she’s written several non-fiction books, like Crazy Salad, I Remember Nothing, and I Feel Bad About My Neck to name a few. Nora’s prose is everything you’d expect: witty and sharp as a tac. And above else, I loved reading it because you can feel how personal it is. She draws you right in and talks to you as if you’re a close friend of hers. Nora took what was likely one of the worst things to happen in her life and made art out of it. She was burned, but at the end of the day, she took control of her narrative. Because of that book, which was then adapted into a screenplay, she launched her screenwriter career. Nora managed to take control of her story and use it to open a new, iconic chapter for herself.
Nora Ephron was a bad ass.
Julie and Julia made me want to write for the screen and Heartburn made me want to write like Nora Ephron. If I’m ever even half as good as her, I’d be happy with that.
