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Summary
Summary
"A portrait that's both complex and moving...Nora would be pleased." -- People (Book of the Week)
Nora Ephron, one of the most famous writers, film makers, and personalities of her time is captured by her long-time and dear friend in a hilarious, blunt, raucous, and poignant recollection of their decades-long friendship.
Nora Ephron (1941-2012) was a phenomenal personality, journalist, essayist, novelist, playwright, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and movie director ( Sleepless in Seattle ; You've Got Mail ; When Harry Met Sally ; Heartburn ; Julie & Julia ). She wrote a slew of bestsellers ( I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman ; I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections ; Scribble, Scribble: Notes on the Media ; Crazy Salad : Some Things About Women ). She was celebrated by Hollywood, embraced by literary New York, and adored by legions of fans throughout the world.
Award-winning journalist Richard Cohen, wrote this about his "third-person memoir": "I call this book a third-person memoir. It is about my closest friend, Nora Ephron, and the lives we lived together and how her life got to be bigger until, finally, she wrote her last work, the play, Lucky Guy , about a newspaper columnist dying of cancer while she herself was dying of cancer. I have interviewed many of her other friends--Mike Nichols, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Arianna Huffington--but the book is not a name-dropping star turn, but an attempt to capture a remarkable woman who meant so much to so many other women."
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Cohen has written a clear-eyed, episodic, and moving tribute to his longtime friend Nora Ephron, a multitalented screenwriter, director, and author who died of cancer in 2012. Journalist Cohen, who met Ephron in 1973, was one of the few people she told about her illness. Here, Cohen creates a portrait of the Ephron behind the public persona-the force behind such success stories as When Harry Met Sally..., Sleepless in Seattle, and I Feel Bad About My Neck. Cohen depicts Ephron as an uncompromising, driven person juggling a family and a career and caring deeply about both; a fierce, generous, and loyal friend who was also often domineering and endowed with a certainty of opinion that brooked no opposition-a tough, determined woman, ready to make hard decisions and speak her mind, but not above being hurt by harsh criticism, and insecure about her looks. In short, Ephron proves a complex subject, but one who is clearly adored and greatly missed by Cohen. The most beautifully rendered portrait of her comes in the last few chapters, which chronicle the end of her life. Here, Cohen writes with emotion, perspective, humor, and grace-the perfect combination, perhaps, to represent his dear friend. Agent: Mort Janklow, Janklow & Nesbit. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Like so many others who knew her, Washington Post columnist Cohen loved Nora Ephron. In her first novel, Heartburn (1983), Ephron made her personal divorce universal. Her essays in I Feel Bad about My Neck (2006) became an anthem for aging women everywhere. Her movies, most notably, Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail!, celebrated contemporary romance in a distinctly old-fashioned way. As a journalist, screenwriter, novelist, and director, Ephron's professional talents were deservedly applauded and awarded. As a hostess, friend, and confidante, however, her vibrancy and loyalty were unrivaled. Ephron populated her worlds Manhattan, Beverly Hills, Washington, D.C. with the famous and not-so-famous and could make anyone feel as if they'd known her forever. So her death in 2012, after five years battling cancer largely in secret, came as a shock to those who knew and loved her and those who wished they had. If it's true that everyone did want Nora as their friend, after reading this lovely and loving memoir, it should be equally true that everyone should want Cohen as theirs. Muse and foil, colleague and crony, Cohen had access to all sides of this decidedly multifaceted woman and reveals not only those of the public Nora everyone admired but also the private Nora whom a very lucky few adored.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHO IN THE course of a celebrity life hasn't been observed behaving badly? Name your offender, but ouch, please not the late, beloved Nora Ephron. If you're among those who saw only the good and the brilliant in her work and admired the bumps in her road, so artfully reported, Richard Cohen would like to burst your bubble. Cohen seems to have missed nary an unflattering word or deed in the 40 years of their friendship, which began when his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein introduced them. In "She Made Me Laugh: My Friend Nora Ephron" he giveth, then taketh away - a margin note I made so often that I began abbreviating it. "She was so charming, so smart, so witty and so sweet that if she turned cold, it was more than an emotional rebuff, it was a failure: You had flunked Nora." Or "For Nora, the story came first. ... Telling it was her job, her duty. She rarely let sentiment get in the way. ... It cost her some friendships. It's not clear, though, if it ever cost her a night's sleep." Other BFFs, step aside. "We were like an old married couple. No one - with the exception of her sisters, especially Delia - knew her as long as I did, and possibly none knew her as well." He wants you to understand he was there for her - between her marriages, in "the distressing period of movie flops," at her bedside when she was dying of acute myeloid leukemia. Make no mistake, despite reporting on her berating the waiters in Naples and limo drivers in Manhattan, he loved Nora Ephron, his "peerless tugboat." What gave him license to squeal? "Over time, I became the Nora interpreter." Cohen, a nationally syndicated columnist for The Post, does a fine job of covering her career, from reporting for The Wellesley College News to toiling as a mail girl at Newsweek, onward to columnist, essay writer, novelist, screenwriter, director, playwright. Whom she dated, whom she married, whom she offended and fired - he reports all this with authority and gusto. He is fond of the topic of looks, Ephron's and others. "She had had the misfortune of being a teenage nonlooker, afflicted with a 1950s deformity - small breasts in the sweater-girl era." The most stunning commentary is not about Ephron but Lillian Heilman, described as "a plain woman of metastasizing ugliness." EXPANDING ON THE title essay in her 2006 collection, "I Feel Bad About My Neck," Cohen explains that it's "a sad, lamentable truth, which is that a woman's neck is a dead giveaway to her age... and will announce itself with a neck that is sagging and mottled and ... well, not youthful." Such declarations are unencumbered by qualifiers such as "in my opinion." We learn that nowadays "homosexuality is no longer considered outré. Premarital sex is now passé, as are open extramarital affairs." Or this, casually, authoritatively, about Nora's close friend Tom Hanks: "hugely popular, hugely successful and somewhat mysterious as to why any of that is true- The camera, as they say, loved him, but the people passing on the street didn't give him a second look." Banish any thought you might have that the author and his subject were romantically involved. And mostly ignore those rumors "continuing past Nora's death" that the title male character in "When Harry Met Sally" is based on Cohen. "It was true, however, that Nora and I discussed the premise, ... which is whether a man and woman can be friends - ?just friends,' as the expression goes." And why not get even more off your chest? "It is also true that Sally Quinn and I had whipped up a four-page movie treatment about a relationship that went from friendly to sexual and had presented it to Nora at lunch." Repeating her son's claim that he never saw his mother and her third husband, Nicholas Pileggi, fight, Cohen rises to the challenge. Once when he was dining out with the couple, Nick "said something. She sharply rebuked him, and he instantly shut her down." As omniscient marital observer, Cohen reassures us that "it never happened again - not in my presence and not, I would guess, anywhere else, either." What a relief! If judged simply as a book, as it should be, and not along a friendship continuum: whoosh. It's juicy, opinionated, indiscreet, immodest, not terribly well organized or fact-checked. (Elvis was not, in the late 1960s, "a regional performer.") In the final chapter Cohen confesses, "I think of her as I write, imagine her head nodding or her rolling her eyes at my pretensions." Merely a roll of her eyes? May his dear, best friend rest in peace. ELINOR LIPMAN'S 11th novel, "On Turpentine Lane," will be published in February.
Library Journal Review
Nationally syndicated Washington Post columnist Cohen chronicles his 40-year friendship with Ephron, the pop culture icon who died in 2012 of complications from leukemia. Cohen details Ephron's career, from her early days as a Wellesley College reporter and Newsweek mail clerk to best-selling author (Heartburn; I Feel Bad About My Neck) and Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director (Sleepless in Seattle; You've Got Mail; Julie & Julia). -Ephron's glamorous lifestyle, her A-list friends and lovers, and complex family relationships are also described in great detail. Cohen's name-dropping account isn't chronological-it feels more like a series of short essays than a traditional memoir-and narrator Christopher Lane can't give the work a cohesive feel. Ephron's admirers may bristle at Cohen's portrayal of this much beloved superstar as an elitist (and often a bully), but he clearly knew her well and chose to present all sides of his complex friend. VERDICT Recommended for -Ephron's many superfans. ["Lengthy, repetitious [and] digressive"; LJ Xpress Reviews 7/22/16 review of the S. & S. hc.]-Beth Farrell, Cleveland State Univ. Law Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
She Made Me Laugh Room 242 As she went in and out of consciousness, she was typically observing the process. "In out, in out," she said. "So it's happening." The room, 242 of New York Hospital, faced south, so if she raised her head she could see down the East River and, over a bit to the west, the skyline of midtown Manhattan. This was her city. She had come from the West to claim it, to make it her own, to know its writers and actors and politicians, but especially the writers because she was one herself, her fame as a director notwithstanding. People drifted in and out of the room. Husband. Children. Friends. Relatives. Her dying was taking longer than expected. She had acute myeloid leukemia and it had devolved into the inevitable and unavoidable pneumonia, and so the end was coming, although it was taking its own sweet time. She was awake and then asleep. Sometimes alert. Sometimes not. She lost track of time, once asking in late afternoon to watch an early morning TV show, Morning Joe. Outside, the river reversed course as estuaries do, sometimes going north, sometimes going south. It seemed apt. Calls were being made. The famous, the somewhat less famous; the talented, the brilliant; the immensely rich, the merely rich, the non-rich; the established writers, the young writers; the struggling young actors, the struggling older actors; Hollywood, New York, East Hampton, Paris, London, and the African American neighborhood of distant Riverhead on Long Island where she had put her longtime maid's daughter through college. A summoning was in process, a call to assemble for a memorial service. There would be no funeral, no imprecations to a god she did not believe existed. (She was mystified that anyone could believe otherwise, and she abhorred the senseless platitude that "everything happens for a reason.") So a call went out to various halls--the Ethical Culture School on Manhattan's Upper West Side and the Council on Foreign Relations on the Upper East Side. Too small. They were all too small. Slowly, it became apparent that a larger hall would have to be secured, something with about a thousand seats. Word of her impending death was spreading, and you could feel a stirring, a deep pain, a tsunami of bereavement that was building and building and which now seems appropriate but at the time was a surprise. I sat on the bed and talked to her. I told her how much she was loved, about all the love in the room. She raised herself and looked out the window, south to the skyline. She extended her left arm and scooped Manhattan into her. "And out there," she said. So she could feel it. It didn't surprise her as much as it did the rest of us. Still, she was a writer, and writers do not have the deaths of celebrities--the kitschy mourning of strangers, the sad bodega flowers, TV tears, and then the sign-off from the anchor, "She will be missed." Writers just slip away. They get an obit in the Times, maybe, and then a small gathering in some dreary West Side apartment, and then, with any luck or some pull and the proper ethnic bona fides, interment in the weathered cemeteries of the Hamptons. Nora would have scoffed at that, anyway--the last-minute lunge toward religion. It was always dangerous to die while Nora was alive. She had things to say. Out there, past her outstretched arm, something was happening. There was a movement, a swelling, a something in the zeitgeist--a rolling groan of impending misery. She could feel it and she did not scoff at it because it was real and genuine. She had it coming, she seemed to feel. She had earned it. But the rest of us were somehow, maybe inexplicably, amazed. Her family, her friends, the doctors chosen by her and thus credentialed as both brilliant and famous--all felt it. And were stunned. Yes, she was sort of famous and she had directed movies, written acclaimed screenplays and best sellers, and even had plays both on and off Broadway and another show in the works. There had been hints. Her books sold really well. And when she made an appearance, throngs materialized. We who knew her, we who had been her friends, we who loved her (not always or all the time), we who still hear her voice on the phone--"Hello, it's Nora."--were too close to see what was happening. The sorrow came through the window, up off the East River, and it had a power. Afterward, some young person wrote a tribute to her in the Washington Post. His name was James McCauley. He had known her. She had made time for him while he was at Harvard and had stayed in touch after he went to work as an intern on the editorial staff of the Post. I was her friend. I was a longtime Washington Post columnist. I knew nothing about the young man. There was an item in the newspaper about Nora and the writer Nathan Englander. He had written a short story about Stalin's murder of the Soviet Union's most acclaimed Yiddish writers. It was called "The 27th Man," and it was contained in a collection that Nora had read. The item said that Nora had gotten in touch with Englander and arranged a breakfast at Barney Greengrass, the famous West Side deli. She told him his story could be a play. She told him she would help him. From then on, they met from time to time. The play opened at the Public Theater in December of 2012. Nora had died in June. I was stunned by the newspaper item. Yiddish writers? Nora could hardly have cared less. A writer on Jewish themes? Not my darling Nora. She once sat through one of my Passover Seders like a traveler marooned in a train station. She abhorred religion. She abhorred my sanctimonious Judaism, erratically and idiosyncratically practiced in delayed homage to the Holocaust. But here she was helping to write a play about Yiddish writers. And she had said nothing to me about the project--me who consumed Jewish history and was, even then, writing a book about Jews and Israel. I emailed Englander. I confessed mystification. "I know you're busy, but I'd like to meet you and also get to know Nora better," I wrote. "I'd even go to Brooklyn." We met for lunch. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know the Nora he knew. The Nora the kid at the Post knew. The Nora whom others were writing about, notably Lena Dunham. Some of these people turned to me to ask similar questions. I had the answers, they thought. I was her friend, her best friend she had told others, and I knew her better than anyone. Whether that was true I still don't know, but I do know that she knew me better than anyone--including, I'm sure she would add, myself. Excerpted from She Made Me Laugh: My Friend Nora Ephron by Richard Cohen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.