The sole exception to this rule was the leukemia that eventually killed her. She turned her own life into material because that’s how she knew to get through it, especially the awful things. And because she wrote it funny, she won.” According to Mike Nichols, who directed Ephron’s films Silkwood and Heartburn, she “cried for six months and she wrote it funny. In New York after leaving DC, she landed at the house of Robert Gottlieb, her editor at Alfred Knopf. (Sorry, Meryl, but you are simply too Presbyterian to play Nora Ephron.) Four years later, she published the novel Heartburn, which follows the events of her life almost exactly and was made into a movie in 1986, with Meryl Streep as the Nora-adjacent character and Jack Nicholson as the Bernstein-adjacent character. He cheated on her while she was pregnant with their second child she got on a plane, eight months pregnant, and left him. She got married again, to Carl Bernstein, and moved to DC. You were the hero of the story.Īnd the laugh was indeed Nora’s. To use her metaphor: you might have slipped on a banana peel, people might have laughed at you, but if you told the story of slipping on the banana peel, you were in control. “Everything is copy,” an adage handed down by her mother, meant to Nora that as long as you were telling the story, you got the last laugh. To hear her friends and family tell it, Nora’s writing was a way of regaining control of her life. Her mother, Phoebe, eventually died of cirrhosis. She was raised the eldest of four daughters by parents who moved to Los Angeles from New York City to become screenwriters.ĭuring her teenage years, things in the family got ugly - her parents both struggled with alcoholism, and their careers began to decline at the same time as their health. To hear her friends and family tell it in Everything Is Copy, the 2015 documentary about Nora’s life directed by Jacob Bernstein, the son she had with Carl Bernstein (yes, the Watergate journalist), that’s more or less how Nora lived her life.

I write about all of the verboten stuff in my life and dare people to judge me for it.

In the world in which I become Marianela Ephron, I am funny and brave and quick-witted and everyone does what I say. I love Nora Ephron as I love all characters, real and fictional, that represent some potential future version of myself.

Nora ephron carl bernstein heartburn