ASIDE FROM that, there’s a big book out and it’s a giant gem, suitable for anyone who admired, worshipped or was even jealous of the writer Nora Ephron.
Her friend, the unique Bob Gottlieb, has worked on Nora’s output and has put together for Knopf publishing “The Most of Nora Ephron” and this collection is just a wow.
Mr. Gottlieb, almost the last of the giant distinguished workers in the literary vineyard, has finished a project he was doing in concert with Nora when she left us suddenly last year. He says Nora saw this big book containing the bulk of her work as a memorial of sorts, realizing while gathering it that she might not be able to finish it.
Her capriciousness, her honesty, her humor, her prescience is almost too sensitive now to believe we didn’t catch on. I guess it doesn’t include absolutely all of Nora’s work but it does offer a good measure: “Heartburn” is here and “I Feel Bad About My Neck” and many of her creations.
She comes across as the journalist, advocate, novelist, playwright, director, screenwriter, foodie, blogger that she was and there is a lot of personal stuff too. Her hits, her errors, her changing ideas are all here, as well as one of my favorites of her rare non-hits, the movie “Michael.” (It is about a dirty minded angel played by John Travolta.) And better still and funnier and more flattering is an essay on me and our experiences long ago in the dim past when I wrote a column for a little paper called The Palm Beach Pictorial. Nora and our “crowd” — when we were young — liked to live vicariously and viciously above the lives of the Palm Beachers whose social lives were depicted therein.
I had forgotten completely my pre-New York newspaper column days and Nora nailed it in spades — the pretentiousness, posing, preening and silliness of that particular social scene. (I might repeat it here one of these days if I think all the protagonists have gone to their rewards.) Anyway, this new Nora collection is full of Nora-isms and would make a nifty Christmas gift for anyone who cares about the life and times of a contemporary writer who is sometimes compared to Mark Twain. (Her memorial was so star-studded, with Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, Tom Hanks, Martin Short, and others of that ilk speaking that I just assume a lot of people care about Nora’s legacy.)
Incidentally, there is a Vanity Fair documentary being put together by Nora’s son, Jacob Bernstein, but my pick for the one person to write the real story of Nora’s life is the astute columnist Richard Cohen of The Washington Post and New York Daily News.
He loved Nora as a friend and she loved him and he would be a wonder at dissecting what she meant to the world.
Mr. Cohen is the man it was revealed recently who has been escorting the good-looking Patricia Duff (once Mrs. Ronald Perlman) around town with romantic intent. But I wrote that last summer, so it wasn’t exactly a scoop in these turbulent days. But you are all welcome to claim the item as yours. |
