Her childhood home was characterized by a “love of language and literature, and of vibrant conversation around a dinner table.” Her parents were devoted to “narrative and comedy,” according to Doidge. She was born into a relatively well-to-do family helmed by two already successful and well-connected playwrights and screenwriters. The story of Ephron’s life, however, is not about a woman who defied the odds stacked up against her and came out on top. (She thought the term “New Journalism” was a bit much, though, because “writing had always been personal to her.”)ĭuring her fifty-year career, she wrote thirteen screenplays that were developed (three of which were nominated for Academy Awards), and she made nearly twenty films, including Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, Michael, and Julie & Julia.

She was an early practitioner of New Journalism, in which first person point-of-view and literary devices typically reserved for fiction were beginning to be used in news articles. She covered “women’s issues” in the early 1960s for New York Magazine and in the early 1970s for Esquire. According to one of her longtime friends and producers, Lynda Obst, she was the first person to write about women and their lives. She was a journalist, an essayist, a screenwriter, and a film director in an age when women were more likely to be career housewives, and she didn’t know she wanted to direct until she was nearly fifty. The book concludes with book club questions, notes, and a selected bibliography.īy most accounts, Ephron was a remarkable woman. It begins with her birth in 1941 and her “unconventional” childhood in New York and California, then chronicles her education at Wellesley, her long and varied career, the ups and downs of her personal life, and her too-early death from acute myeloid leukemia in 2012. It’s organized into five “acts” that move chronologically through Ephron’s life. It’s highly accessible, uses both primary and secondary source material, and is alive with Ephron’s own voice and words throughout.

I was predisposed to like Doidge’s biography because of its subject, and I wasn’t disappointed. She was a feminist, an essayist, and a screenwriter: check, check, and check. She loved Jane Austen and reread Pride and Prejudice every year. She was the eldest of four sisters I am the second of five.

I felt connected to her in other ways, too.

Her 2008 collection, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, is still one of my favorites. From there, I discovered her other work, particularly her essays. I learned Ephron had written the screenplay. I was graduating from high school in 1989 when the rom-com, When Harry Met Sally, was released. “All roads lead to Nora,” Kristin Marguerite Doidge writes at the start of Nora Ephron: A Biography, and I can’t disagree.

I hate my neck by nora ephron