What can you say about a woman who makes you happy every time you read her? A writer who can prise a smile even out of a scowl till a deep rumble emanating from your stomach ends in a full-throated laugh?
American writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron is the funniest woman I have ever encountered in print. She wrote many books, but has an equal number of books written about her. I’ll Have What She’s Having: How Nora Ephron’s Three Iconic Films Saved The Romantic Comedy by Erin Carlson is the latest. The title is from the famous scene in When Harry Met Sally , where Sally simulates the most famous orgasm in cinema in a restaurant. The scene ends with an elderly woman telling the waiter that she’ll have what Sally is having. Much as this scene was made memorable by Meg Ryan, who played Sally, the film worked because Ephron, the writer, was at her wittiest.
The conversations between Harry and Sally centred around whether men and women can just be friends. Writing about the film, Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian critic, wrote: “Ephron re-invented the metropolitan romantic comedy, taking it from writers like Woody Allen and Neil Simon and melding it with the more modern concept of the ‘relationship’ comedy, something with more emotional literacy.” You see this playing out in You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle, which is what I’ll Have What She’s Having is about.
Much as Ephron was known for her sharp wit, the observations she made in her books such as I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections and I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman seemed more like practical advice. Don’t go to the plastic surgeon, is one. “If you go to a plastic surgeon and say, I’d like you to just to fix my neck, he will tell you flat out that he can’t do it without giving you a face-lift too. And he’s not lying,” she wrote.
In She Made My Laugh: My Friend Nora Ephron, Richard Cohen writes: “She wrote incessantly, not to mention brilliantly, about the problems of being a woman… about the very essence of being a woman.”
Leukemia claimed Ephron in 2012, but the words she left behind appear to mock the dreaded disease. You can claim me, they appear to be saying, but you can’t stop people from smiling when they read what I have written.
