Review by New York Times Review
Funny Lady THE MOST OF NORA EPHRON 557 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35. there was a time when Nora Ephron was frequently compared to Dorothy Parker, even by Nora Ephron. ("All I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker. The funny lady. The only lady at the table. The woman who made her living by her wit.") I believe we have all gotten over that. As Ephron herself figured out long ago, the idea of Dorothy Parker was far superior to the living version, who was good with a one-liner but not much fun to be around. The real Nora Ephron was the person everybody wanted to hang out with, in part because she was funny and charming but more critically because she made the people she was with feel funny and charming. (I certainly wanted to hang around her, and we were friends for years.) She was never the life of the party in the classic center-of-the-crowd sense. She was the one who listened and then finally tossed in the one fabulous line that brought everything together. Her best writing was exactly the same. "The Most of Nora Ephron" runs 557 pages while still being far from a "complete works." (As her son Jacob, a reporter for The New York Times's Styles section, pointed out, this was a woman who spent the last six years of her life battling a form of leukemia and yet in that time "wrote 100 blog posts, two books and two plays, and directed a movie.") But it's a good reminder of some of the strengths of her remarkable career. She spent only a few early years in the official world of journalism, but a reporter's sensibility covers almost everything in the book. Even if you don't remember who Helen Gurley Brown was, you're grateful Ephron was there when the Cosmopolitan editor told her, "You've got to make yourself more cupcakable all the time so that you're a better cupcake to be gobbled up." Or that she was on the scene when the casino owner Steve Wynn accidentally poked an elbow through his $139 million Picasso and quickly told the horrified onlookers, "Thank God it was me." Ephron had an extremely glamorous life. (How do you think she got in the room with Wynn and his Picasso?) But as she strode through it, she was always mentally taking notes. Her screenwriter mother famously told her, "Everything is copy," but that's not quite true. For most people, everything is a potential dinner anecdote. It takes a particular combination of winning voice and brutal candor, of intimacy and objectivity, to turn what happens to you into a story that means something to the wider world. The writer who discovered she could make a national audience laugh with a meditation on her small breasts or a novel about her disastrous divorce evolved into the woman who could write about getting old with devastating humor and clarity in "I Feel Bad About My Neck" and "I Remember Nothing." "The Most of Nora Ephron" gives her fans a chance to rummage through her desk - there are bound to be things you haven't read, along with pieces you want to visit again. Nothing makes me happier than rereading her writing on women's liberation. ("Every so often, someone suggests that Gloria Steinern is only into the women's movement because it is currently the chic place to be; it always makes me smile, because she is about the only remotely chic thing connected with the movement.") And while blog postings tend to have a limited shelf life, nobody can possibly resist one titled "Reflections on Reading the Results of President Bush's Annual Physical Examination." This is the kind of collection meant for snacking - I can sort of hear Nora saying, "You're not supposed to go straight through." She would want readers to meander, sampling things they had never tried or bits that look especially tasty. But I was surprised by how satisfying the big chunks are - the novel, "Heartburn" ; a movie script, "When Harry Met Sally..."; and "Lucky Guy," a play about the tabloid columnist Mike McAlary. "Lucky Guy," which opened on Broadway less than a year after Ephron's death, is a kind of love letter to the old world of tabloid journalism. (Early in her career, Ephron spent five happy years at The New York Post.) It was also a reporting project - she talked to so many of McAlary's colleagues that on opening night the theater had a special section reserved for interviewees. Every person who has ever spent time working on a tabloid has imagined there's a novel or a play in it. Many, many of those people attempt to follow through, and the results generally turn out to be a fiasco, or a tale that's really about catching an escaped murderer, or a child who falls down a well. The actual meat of the occupation - the way you turn a normal news report into a story, the intricate relationship between editor and reporter, the tricks for convincing the benumbed relatives of murder victims that their grief would be a little more bearable if they were to spill their guts - often gets left in the first draft. It's a tough world to recreate, partly because newsrooms aren't generally as colorful and exciting as their inhabitants like to pretend. But Ephron figured out how to hang on to the mythic spirit while showing us the real. "HEARTBURN," HER ONLY NOVEL, Was published in 1983, when she had already been a literary celebrity for quite some time - a much-quoted columnist for national magazines, the wife of the Watergate celebrity Carl Bernstein and a member of the galaxy of political-media stars who twinkled around the nation's capital during one of those improbable periods when Washington was fashionable. As every sentient being on the Northeast Corridor knew, "Heartburn" was about the implosion of her marriage after Bernstein took up with another woman while Ephron was pregnant. When it came out, the takeaway from the novel - which was later turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep - was about audacity (She wrote about it! ) and wit (She wrote about it and made it funny!) and its originality (There are recipes!). Reading "Heartburn" again, so many years later, you still get the wit (and the recipes). The surprise is how skillfully Ephron does heartbreak. Her heroine, Rachel Samstat, worries toward the end that "I've done what I usually do - hidden the anger, covered the pain, pretended it wasn't there for the sake of the story." But the pain is most definitely there, even as Ephron is providing a map for how to tell the story of the worst humiliation of your life in a way that leaves them laughing. "Heartburn," for all its funny scenes, is a novel about love lost, just the way "When Harry Met Sally..." is a screenplay about love found. What really interested Ephron, for all her clever writing about food, politics and overcluttered purses, were matters of the heart. She is the exact opposite of Dorothy Parker. She is wit without cynicism, the ultimate romantic. ? GAIL COLLINS, an Op-Ed columnist for The Times, is the author of six books, including "When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 8, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
Nora Ephron (1941-2012) was an exceptionally smart, funny, and caring journalist, essayist, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, blogger, producer, and director. Her last two books, I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections (2010) and I Feel Bad about My Neck (2006), were best-sellers; her films include Silkwood, Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail, and Julie & Julia. No matter how versed in Ephron's cherished work a reader may be, she or he will be dazzled and touched anew by this life-spanning, life-embracing collection that so richly showcases her clarity, brio, and candor. Mining her own intriguing life in Beverly Hills and New York, Ephron wrote about what it means to be female, from her hilarious A Few Words about Breasts in 1972 to her touched-a-nerve laments about marriage, motherhood, age, and persistent sexism. A canny interpreter of the zeitgeist, Ephron threshed topics social, cultural, and political, and shared her passion for food. Nearly 80 stellar essays are accompanied by Ephron's novel, Heartburn; her play, Lucky Guy, and her acclaimed, oft-quoted screenplay for When Harry Met Sally. A tonic and essential celebration of a scintillating and mighty writer. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Ephron's bereft readership will embrace this robust, strongly promoted tribute to her incandescent talent and intensely creative life.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This posthumous collection celebrates Ephron's talent for turning her experiences into material, no matter the medium. Organized by occupation ("The Journalist," "The Advocate," "The Foodie," "The Blogger," and others), the volume contains numerous classics: her novel Heartburn; the screenplay to When Harry Met Sally; and wry essays on aging that made her collections, I Feel Bad About My Neck and I Remember Nothing, bestsellers. Ephron's last work, Lucky Guy, a play about the career of New York tabloid journalist Mike McAlary, is published here for the first time. The book's most delicious offering is Ephron's magazine journalism from the 1970s, with razor-sharp profiles of figures such as Helen Gurley Brown, Dorothy Schiff, and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, and keenly intelligent reportage on subjects that include the 1971 National Women's Political Caucus and the 1973 Pillsbury Bake-off competition. From Ephron's days as a reporter at Newsweek in the 1960s to blogging for the Huffington Post in the 2000s, the book documents the changing culture of the New York media world. "Everything is copy," Ephron's mother always said. This collection fulfills that motto with aplomb, and will likely serve as a perfect holiday gift for Ephron fans. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A treasury of Ephron (1941-2012), this collection contains the writer's best essays, from Crazy Salad to I Remember Nothing, her one-and-only novel, Heartburn, her legendary screenplay, When Harry Met Sally, a selection of her blog entries from the Huffington Post, and her never-before published play, Lucky Guy, about New York City's tabloid journalism. Representing 40-plus years of work, this volume illustrates not only Ephron's dynamic writing career as a journalist-turned-novelist-turned-filmmaker but also her incredible wit. Whether Ephron is writing about politics or purses, sexism or souffle, her appeal is her intelligent, incisive sense of humor. This is also part of what makes her such an icon, not "for America's women," as editor Robert Gottlieb writes in his introduction, but for America. Women may idolize her-she is the major inspiration for funny girl Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO hit Girls-but through her writing and films, she has changed the actual timbre of American humor. VERDICT Although some valuable essays are missed (e.g., "Dealing with the, Uh, Problem" and "Rose Mary Woods: The Lady or the Tiger?"), Gottlieb manages to pack this almost 600-page anthology with Ephron's most timeless pieces. Since we will never have enough of Nora Ephron, the most will have to do.-Meagan Lacy, Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ. Indianapolis Libs. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A thick collection of writings by the iconic Ephron (I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections, 2010, etc.), a year after her much-mourned death. In his introduction, the author's longtime editor, Robert Gottlieb, reveals that in 2010, he and the author, at that point very ill, began talking about the contents of the anthology. They decided to structure it around the subject matters she explored and the genres she used to explore them. As a result, the text of her novel Heartburn (1983) is included, as is the screenplay for Ephron's most beloved movie, When Harry Met Sally, and her late-in-life play, Lucky Guy. The remainder of the anthology consists of much briefer entries across an impressively diverse set of topics. The final two entries are two lists, "What I Won't Miss" (dry skin, my closet, Fox, the collapse of the dollar) and "What I Will Miss," which unsurprisingly mentions her children, her third (and final) husband and walking in the park. The very last item on the list is "Pie." Reading nearly 600 pages of Ephron in one volume is a joy, not only due to the range of her interests, her capacious mind, her mixture of humor and satire and self-deprecation, but also her skill as a stylist. Few writers of Ephron's range and output have written so few clunky sentences or so many memorable ones. Also included is perhaps her most famous essay--and almost certainly the one most reprinted after Ephron's death--which expounded on the flatness of her chest; her neck became as famous as her chest but not until 2003. Ephron might be best remembered, however, for her searing insights into the craft of journalism and the complications of feminism. A delightful collection from a unique, significant American writer.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
