Remembering two writers who would resonate today
During a recent move, my daughter deposited several boxes of books at my house for later retrieval. (I’m cheaper than a storage unit.) I took the opportunity to paw through them and borrow or steal a few volumes that tempted me. One of these was “I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections,” an essay collection by the journalist, screenwriter and playwright Nora Ephron. This slight volume, which I read in a single evening, was published in 2010, two years before Ephron’s death at 71 from complications of leukemia.
I had long been a fan of Ephron, having read her essay collection “Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women” (1975) and column collection “Scribble Scribble: Notes on the Media” (1978) in my youth. I consider three films she wrote — “Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail” and “When Harry Met Sally” — the best rom-coms of the 1980s and ’90s. (Yes, I’m a dude and I like chick flicks. Bring on the toxic masculinity-fueled mocking.)
I finished “I Remember Nothing” while I sat in my car in an airport cellphone lot waiting for a friend’s flight to arrive. The 23 essays in the book range in length from a single paragraph on the supposed healing powers of chicken soup to 16 pages on Ephron’s love affair with journalism. All are engaging and readable — some mere flights of whimsy, others deeply thoughtful meditations on the author’s experiences and acquaintances. The last two pieces, lists of
“What I Won’t Miss” and “What I Will Miss,” are funny but poignant, suggesting that Ephron knew her life was near its end.
As I closed the book and turned off the car’s dome light, it struck me that I couldn’t think of a contemporary analogue to Ephron — a thought I once also had about another writer I deeply admire, the late Texas journalist Molly Ivins. Notwithstanding the title of this essay, the two women never met as far as I know. They were close to the same
age; Ephron was born in 1941, Ivins in 1944. Ivins died of breast cancer in 2007; she would have turned 78 on Aug. 30. Both women came from well-heeled families and attended elite schools. As writers, both were acclaimed for their skillful use of humor and irony to mock public figures they considered silly, foolish or downright evil.
Still, the differences between them are obvious: Ivins, although she lived for a time in New York, was Texan to the core, while Ephron, raised in Los Angeles, was a devoted Mannhatanite. Ivins stuck to journalism; Ephron, after a successful early career as a newspaper and magazine writer, branched out into the film writing for which she is best remembered. Their writing vocabularies reflected their different cultural orbits. Ivins: “As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can’t drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against ’em anyway, you don’t belong in office.” Ephron: “There’s an entire population of panelists today, mostly guys, who make a living in some way or another but whose true career consists of appearing at conferences like this. Some of these panelists are players and some are merely journalists, but for a brief moment, the Panel equalizes them all.”
In a recent Texas Monthly essay, “Why Molly Ivins Matters More than Ever,” Mimi Swartz noted the prophetic nature of some of Ivins’ work. “As far back as 50 years ago,” Swartz writes, “she was at the forefront of issues that have taken on even greater urgency today: she fought for reproductive rights, labeled unlicensedgun owners a blight, and named global warming as the threat we denied at our peril.”
I would argue that Ephron, 10 years after her death, matters in a related way. While Ivins’ targets were self-important, foolish, deceitful or hypocritical politicians, Ephron deployed her wordcraft against intellectual and cultural luminaries or ephemeral popular trends. On New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, whose comments she had heard on tape at a conference: “Coincidentally, a night earlier, I had found myself standing across from Friedman, in person, at a craps table in Las Vegas. As he rolled the dice to make a five, I shouted, ‘This is it, Tom, this is your chance to make up for being wrong on Iraq.’ But he rolled a seven and crapped out.” On egg whites as a form of virtue signaling: “As for egg salad, here’s our recipe: boil 18 eggs, peel them, and send six of the egg whites to friends in California who persist in thinking that egg whites matter in any way. Chop the remaining 12 eggs and six yolks coarsely with a knife, and add Hellman’s mayonnaise and salt and pepper to taste.”
Ephron acknowledges that this topic is not as important as, say, the war in Afghanistan, still raging when this piece was first published in 2006. But I would argue that the people and ideas that influence what we eat, what movie and musical artists we idolize, what books and columns we read, and even for whom we vote, are also ripe targets for the kind of sly, irreverent writing Ephron deployed so adroitly. Today we have plenty of writers celebrating or denouncing fads like TikTok, but imagine how delightfully Ephron might have treated these topics. Articles, essays and books about Donald Trump are so ubiquitous as to be almost indistinguishable, but Ephron (and of course Ivins) would have feasted on his ravings in vital and distinctive ways. Here’s my best attempt at what Ephron might have written about the face mask wars: “As I squeezed my way down the narrow aisle of the 747 and plopped into my seat, an overweight, floridfaced man in the seat across from me scowled at my KN95 mask. ‘What a joke,’ he said. ‘You really think that thing is doing any good?’ In reply, I pulled it up over my eyes. ‘Now it does,’ I said. ‘I don’t have to look at you.’ ”
One of the essays in “I Remember Nothing” reflects the kind of humility that might have emerged as the author confronted the likelihood of her imminent death. The piece, titled “Pentimento,” recounts Ephron’s friendship and ultimate disillusionment with the writer Lillian Hellman after Hellman was credibly accused of fabrication in her memoirs: “And the story is always the same: the younger woman idolizes the older woman; she stalks her; the older woman takes her up; the younger woman finds out the older woman is only human; the story ends. If the younger woman is a writer, she eventually writes something about the older woman. And then years pass. And she herself gets older. And there are moments when she would like to apologize — at least for the way it ended. And this may be one of them.”
It might be fair to say that Nora Ephron was a somewhat gentler, less raw version of Molly Ivins. But I’m not sure which of these essential writers I miss more.