Writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron’s works have spanned decades and a wide variety of mediums. Her writing has appeared in newspapers and magazines, in film and in the theater, and in bestselling books. She has made us laugh, made us cry, and made us fall in love. She has opened herself up and shared her joys and her heartbreaks, her frustrations and her recipes. She changed the modern romantic comedy, and made us all better humans in the process.
In Nora Ephron: A Biography, Kristin Marguerite Doidge has put together a comprehensive look at the life of Nora Ephron, from her childhood through her highest grossing film. But it’s more than just the story of her life. This book is filled with quotes from her friends and family—and even from her own writings—to show the impact that she had on those closest to her.
Nora was deeply influenced by her parents, who were screenwriters in Hollywood and, eventually, alcoholics. She has three younger sisters, who she helped raise until it was time for her to go to Wellesley. She got an internship in John F. Kennedy’s White House and worked in newspapers before finding her voice and her place in the New Journalism of the 1960s/1970s, writing personal essays that many women could relate to. When her marriage to famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein blew up, she wrote Heartburn (first the novel, then the film) to help find her way back to hope.
As a young mother (she and Carl had two young sons), Nora didn’t want to travel, so instead of going back to journalism, she turned to screenwriting. She wrote the script for Silkwood with her writing partner Alice Arlen, and then the screenplay for Heartburn, and then When Harry Met Sally…, based on conversations with friend Rob Reiner. But getting to spend time on the set with directors like Reiner and Mike Nichols made Nora hungry for more. She wanted to direct, and those who knew her best knew tat she could nail it.
She started with This Is My Life, based on a novel by Meg Wolitzer, before moving on to Sleepless in Seattle, Mixed Nuts, Michael, and You’ve Got Mail. By that point, she’d already left a lasting impression on the film industry and those like me who loved to watch a good story in the theater or at home on the sofa. But she still went on to create Julie & Julia, her final film.
Many of these scripts she wrote with her sister Delia, whose novel and script for Hanging Up created a rift between the sisters (or just illuminated the rift between the sisters) that caused the sisters to stop talking to each other for a long time. They did make up, and eventually they cowrite the play Love, Loss, and What I Wore, based on the novel by Ilene Beckerman.
Throughout all of her work, Nora stayed true to herself—she wrote funny, moving, personal stories. She won our hearts and reminded us how healing a good meal or a piece of pie can be. She was smart and generous, and she helped make the world more open to the voices of women. She continues to be an important part of popular culture, and Nora Ephron: A Biography underlines just how much impact she’s had on our hearts and our minds.
Author Doidge has done a great deal of research on Ephron, her work, her family, and her friends to pack this book with information and memories. She offers a different perspective on Nora’s life, putting her work into historical, cultural, and family perspective while also offering insights and stories that add so much richness to her work. Hearing about how she chartered a bus to take the cast and crew of a movie to a deli for her favorite pastrami sandwich, or how Rob Reiner’s questions about dating after his divorce ended up both in When Harry Met Sally… and Sleepless in Seattle, or how both she and her husband Nick Pileggi used Henry Hill’s memoir about life in the mob to write a screenplay (he wrote Goodfellas; she wrote My Blue Heaven) made me love her more and see her as an amazing friend and leader as well as the talented writer I knew her to be. Doidge brings Nora Ephron to life and celebrates her words and her work so everyone can get to know Nora on a more personal level.
I listened to the audio book for Nora Ephron: A Biography, and I loved the narration from Hillary Huber. There were points of the book that got a little repetitive as if Doidge expects readers to jump around to different sections of the book (and they might), so reading it from start to finish was a little awkward at times (like when she explains what the film Silkwood was about in the Epilogue, as if she hadn’t talked about it several times throughout the book). But overall, I learned so much about Nora and her work, and I know I will never read her books or watch her films the same way again. I definitely recommend this one to all Nora fans.
Egalleys for Nora Ephron: A Biography were provided by a publicist, but the audio version was included with my Audible subscription, so I listened to the book through the Audible app.
