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Nora Ephron: Writer, Filmmaker, Feminist, Wit

Authors: Politics from The Nation Nora Ephron poses for a photo at her home in New York, Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charles Sykes) Nora Ephron died on Tuesday. It sounds silly to say so, but I had no idea she was anything like 71 (not old, as she told Charlie Rose—old is 80. But still). She wrote two bestselling books about aging, but to me she was ageless—a brilliant, elegant, hilarious woman at the top of her creative powers since forever—since before I used to proofread her Esquire column, back in the early ’70s, which was definitely the high point of that job. As a writer and a filmmaker, she was charming, acerbic, shrewd and hilarious. She was honest about things women often keep quiet about. She wrote about having small breasts and wishing she didn’t. She gave the last word on fake orgasms in the immortal scene of Meg Ryan in the deli in When Harry Met Sally. In a triumphant example of making literary lemonade out of a big fat extra-bitter lemon, she wrote "Heartburn, a deliciously vengeful roman à clef about the breakup of her marriage to Carl Bernstein (the husband “was capable of having sex with a Venetian blind”

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