Ephron’s autobiographical novel is not to be missed

In I Remember Nothing, the first thing Nora Ephron tells us is that she has lost her memory, thus validating her title but also ruefully sharing a sense of aging with us.

Among others, Ephron wrote the screenplays for Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally. She mentions none of them.

She recalls her early years when she went from Wellesley to Newsweek – because she thought being a journalist would be “a good way to meet men” – but learned “women didn’t become writers at Newsweek.”

That was in the early ’60s. Later she went to the New York Post and was able to write for it: she covered Robert Kennedy, went to meet the Beatles.

“I loved the Post,” she wrote. “Of course it was a zoo. The editor was a sexual predator. The managing editor was a lunatic. Sometimes it seemed that half the staff was drunk. But I loved my job.”

And she learned to write.

She’d grown up in Beverly Hills but always wanted to live in New York, and when she got there it was everything she’d hoped it would be. One interview meant somethng very special to her.

Her mother, had become a severe alcoholic virtually overnight when Nora was 15, before she went to college. She hated her mother and then herself for hating her, wishing the mother she had worshipped were dead. One incident she loved about her was the night Lillian Ross came for dinner there and was shown a picture of the Ephron children.

“Do you ever see them?” Ross asked.

“Out!” said her mother, and Ross was forced to leave.

Nora never knew if this had actually happened. But as her magazine life picked up she had an opportunity to interview Ross, monosyllabic as she turned out to be. Casually, Ross volunteered that she had been to the Ephrons’ house once.

Nora felt she had her mother back: “I’d got back the mother I’d idolized before it had all gone to hell.”

Ephron writes in an ironic style at times when relating an ironic episode; though at other times, it’s straight narrative, unafraid of revealing her own feelings.

Her subjects are all over the place: food (“I love salt – lots of it, and butter”), money, a movie she was watching that kept getting out of sync, 25 things people have a capacity to be surprised about “over and over again,” conferences, the fact that journalists can be wrong, how hurt she was when a movie she’d written was panned – but how she perked up when someone told her it was miscast… she’s a great list-maker.

She once interviewed Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom on their fabulous marriage (in separate rooms) – only to find that their divorce was coming up the next week.

Same thing for herself. She’d made a date with a journalist to have her picture taken with her husband, but by the time he came for the interview, she’d left her marriage and forgotten all about him.

The writing is charming, straightforward and honest – always making a point as if she was chatting with you. What she thought of aging: old is 80.

When people are mentioned (mostly famous ones), they are introduced to make a valid point. She discussed how proud she was that her meatloaf got on the menu at a restaurant Graydon Carter ran – until it was replaced by spaghetti and meatballs; how she learned her second husband was cheating on her; getting old; and random lists, the last two on “what I won’t miss” and “what I will miss.”

Nora died this year at the age of 71.

Posted by Rae Eastman on October 11, 2012. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Book Reviews,Columns,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry