EVERYBODY LOVES NORA

Nora Ephron changed the way Hollywood depicted love stories. Sinead Stubbins explores why her work is still so influential

We heart Nora Ephron, romcom queen.

I have this vision of my ideal self hosting a lively dinner party attended by a charismatic crew of famous writers, directors and artists. This fantasy gathering takes place in my New York apartment, furnished with cream couches that never get dirty. I’m wearing fabulously soft, brown loafers. I say witty things that are cutting, but not so cutting that people remark to each other “whoa, that was mean!” on their way home.

This fantasy is not mine alone. Actually, it has been entirely informed by the work of Nora Ephron – the journalist, screenwriter, novelist, playwright, filmmaker and creative magnet, who was the force behind the modern romantic comedy. This year, two of her most iconic films, Sleepless In Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, celebrate their 25th and 20th anniversaries respectively. But why is her work still so meaningful?

“Ephron’s writing is special because it’s fearless,” says Michelle Law, co-writer and co-creator of SBS’ Homecoming Queens and Ephron disciple. “She didn’t shy away from being silly and fun, which people in the entertainment industry can look down upon as ‘too female’ or lowbrow.”

Ephron gained notoriety as an essayist in the ’60s and ‘70s, writing dangerously funny critiques of the feminist movement and herself (in some of her essays she lamented the size of her breasts and confessed her most “un-liberated sex fantasy” – being desired by ferocious, faceless men who don’t “love me for my mind”). Ephron’s own life – even her second divorce in the case of her first novel, Heartburn – became the central inspiration of her work. In the documentary Everything Is Copy, directed by her son Jacob Bernstein after her death in 2012, she explains that, “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. When you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.” There was something cool and glamorous about her, even when she was laying bare the most difficult moments of her life. You can see the influence of her honest, risky work in the writing of similarly frank women like Lena Dunham, Sloane Crosley and Jessi Klein.

This ability to translate tragedy into comedy made her a trailblazer filmmaker. Her three most famous films, 1989’s When Harry Met Sally…, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, could be read as a trilogy about the fragility and tedium of relationships and the disconnect between what we say and what we mean. Sleepless In Seattle is a movie about a woman (Meg Ryan) falling in love with a man she hears on the radio (Tom Hanks) which should be creepy, but somehow isn’t. You’ve Got Mail is about IRL enemies (again, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks) falling in love online, but avoids “yikes” territory because the protagonists are so damn endearing. “You’ve Got Mail is the perfect romantic comedy,” says Law. “It’s also very of its time and flawed, but in a way I like how it stays true to the idealism of its genre, without going overboard.”

Mindy Kaling has named You’ve Got Mail as her favourite rom-com and said Ephron’s movies “taught me what love should look like”. She treated stories about love as something that shouldn’t be trivialised (Law praises Ephron for her lack of “fear of seeming naff”), so audiences didn’t feel ashamed about enjoying her movies. Her films balance seemingly opposite poles – they’re both sharp and emotional, screwball but also permeated with anxiety, fiercely funny and sparkly, but with moments of stark realness. TV shows like The Mindy Project, Younger and Insecure feel like descendants of this refusal to dismiss romance as a worthy subject matter.

Ephron’s writing was brutally candid; she once said “writers are cannibals” in mining their personal lives for material. In Everything Is Copy, Meg Ryan says Ephron’s “allegiance to language” was sometimes greater than her concern for people’s feelings. (In You’ve Got Mail, Tom Hanks’ character warns, “when you finally have the pleasure of saying the thing you mean to say at the moment you mean to say it, remorse inevitably follows”). This ability to identify (sometimes vicious) human truths is obvious in her films, where the best bits happen in the conversations between the ‘big’ moments. “She hid all these little human interactions around these witty, funny things,” said Meryl Streep of her friend. “She understood love.”

Ephron’s real legacy was depicting romance without judgement. Sentimentality was cool if she said so – and she’d have let you know otherwise. This dazzling ability to be both a straight-talker and a conduit for joy was the reason so many people were pulled into her orbit, hoping to absorb her brilliance. A dinner party at her place seems like an exciting, hilarious, volatile catastrophe – and yes, she probably would have made fun of my loafers.

“HER FILMS BALANCE OPPOSITE POLES – BOTH SHARP AND EMOTIONAL”