Look, I get that writing unkindly about women was a "thing" for a while, but it's just cringey to read now, especially from someone who, in the previous section, was such a staunch feminist. Think of The Most of Nora Ephron as a big book of everything you already love about the acute author, bound together into one tome begging to be dog-eared. In 2007, Ephron received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member George Lucas. While at Esquire, she took on subjects as wide-ranging as Dorothy Schiff, her former boss and owner of the Post; Betty Friedan, whom she chastised for pursuing a feud with Gloria Steinem; and her alma mater Wellesley, which she said had turned out "a generation of docile and unadventurous women". Ephron’s friend the editor Victor Navasky—who would go on to edit The Nation—began to print parodies of the New York City rags.

In 2013, she received a posthumous Tony Award nomination for Best Play for Lucky Guy, her last play. We honour Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' continuous connection to Country, waters, skies and communities.

For more reads on love, feminism, and life, check out our list of funny books for women, which also features work by Nora Ephron. The writing is always breezy and Ephron knows how to hit her punchlines, but a lot of the pieces in here felt disposable and unnecessary to me. One of Ephron’s best pieces is a profile of the Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, which ran in Esquire in 1970. From tracking down the beginnings of the self-help movement to an iconic movie in the making, Ephron uses her journalistic skill to tap into and reveal our obsessions with celebrity, food, romance, clothes, entertainment, and sex.

Transforming Ephron into a cuddly heroine, a figure of mood and atmosphere, obscures the artist whose interest, above all, was in verbal precision. We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Ephron's first produced play, Imaginary Friends (2002), was honored as one of the ten best plays of the 2002–03 New York theatre season. When she did rock the boat (and she achieved many ground-breaking “firsts“ in her career) she did it with wit, and without raising her voice.As far as I can tell, there's no new material here, just a wide variety of her work curated to give a representative sampling. Her screenplay for "When Harry Met Sally" and her book "Heartburn" were so easy to become entralled in.

After finishing The Most of Nora Ephron, I have to say that it is one of the best books I’ve ever read. She then directed the comedy fantasy film Michael (1996) starring John Travolta, Andie MacDowell and William Hurt.

The story of When Harry Met Sally is as hilarious on the page as it is on the screen, and this version includes an introduction Ephron herself. Powell, in not only reading Child’s work but revisiting it, daily, with monklike commitment, enters into an ardent literary affair that ignites her dormant skills. Romance, here, is a man telling a woman that he likes her for, and not in spite of, her exhaustive language.

Examples include how 'Harry met Sally' blossomed from experiences with Rob Reiner; marriage to Carl Bernstein, the basis for "Heartburn" and "Sleepless in Seattle" from the years between her three marriages. Organized by occupation (“The Journalist,” “The Advocate,” “The Foodie,” “The Blogger,” and others), the volume contains numerous classics: her novel Heartburn; the screenplay to When Harry Met Sally; and wry essays on aging that made her collections, I Feel Bad About My Neck and I Remember Nothing, bestsellers.which expounded on the flatness of her chest; her neck became as famous as her chest but not until 2003. I have now been reading Nora Ephron for 30 years and if it weren't for her unfortunate passing a couple of years ago I'd be thrilled to read her for another 30 years. It's a smart, pithy and hilarious portrait of a marriage breaking down, loaded up with Ephron's trademark wit and some stylishly sharp writing. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Ephron rewrote a script for All the President's Men in the mid-1970s, along with her then husband, investigative journalist Carl Bernstein.