just here to have a good time
This Week in Reading:
The Most of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron
Reading Nora Ephron after reading so much Joan Didion, I can’t help but draw parallels between the two. Nora is seven years younger than Joan, but they came up at around the same time professionally. They both started in journalism, though neither of them became known for their journalistic work. They moved on to write novels, screenplays and essay collections, switching formats seamlessly, as if it never occurred to them that they couldn’t. Their syntax is similar as well. They are masters of offhand comments, prone to tangent and anecdote.
Of course, they are very different as well. Joan Didion is the smartest person at a dinner party, holding court at one end of the table, and Nora Ephron is the tipsiest, funniest one, at the other end. They are opposite sides of the same coin. Joan Didion writes about the things she loves with a clarity so sharp it feels like criticism. Nora Ephron can call Helen Gurley Brown, the editor-in-chief of Cosmo, a tasteless fool and it feels like a compliment.
I love Nora Ephron, of course, because she reminds me of myself. Or at least a version of myself where I am also the greatest screenwriter in Hollywood history. (This is also, obviously, a way of inching myself closer to Joan Didion. I am like Nora, and Nora is like Joan and so maybe I too, am like Joan. Another difference between the two—Nora feels approachable.) I am never the drunkest person at a bar, but I am absolutely the tipsiest person at any dinner party I attend. I will tell some good stories and top off everyone’s wine, and probably offend someone I just met by telling them I don’t watch movies that are pre-Jaws. Invite me over to dinner sometime; it will be fun, I promise.
Nora loves the same non-segues I do. She routinely starts a story with “I just want to say,” changes the subject on a dime with a blithe “anyways”, promptly returns back to her original point with an “in any case”. We are both good cooks, but in the way that we are both good at clipping other people’s recipes and following the instructions. Nora’s arguments go from a to b to z—everything seems to be puttering along smoothly until she suddenly declares that there hasn’t been a good dinner party in the entire state of California in decades. Neither of us are scared to take a wild left turn in a conversation or produce a completely bananas opinion about any topic at the drop of a hat, completely unprompted. It is a relief to read Nora Ephron and realize that if she can do all of these things and somehow be delightful instead of obnoxious, maybe I can be as well.
Here is the thing with Nora: she is always, absolutely, unfailingly charming. I’ve long believed it is more important to be charming than professional. I don’t have incredibly impressive qualifications, but I do have a good personality. I actually say that in my cover letter, I say that I have a “charming personality.” This approach seems to have worked pretty well so far, but I’m also not making six figures right now, so take this professional advice with a grain of salt.
At its core, this is simply a fun book, and don’t we all need a bit more fun in our lives? Particularly in books, but also in movies and art, and also just in general, I guess, there is a tendency to celebrate suffering. Tragedy can be mined endlessly for drama and metaphor. Terrible things happen, and we feel awful. And so we presume that our sadness is meaningful, lest we face the possibility that all of our suffering might be for nothing, might not serve any purpose at all. We assume that to be smart is to be serious, and that to be serious is to be sad. But of course, you can be smart and without being sad. You can even be smart without being serious. Nora Ephron is proof.
There is an assumption that suffering is inherently interesting, when in truth it is incredibly boring. Honestly, I am having an incredibly shitty year, but my sadness is the same as everyone else’s. I did not invent unhappiness. But we all think that our pain is revelatory, or poignant, or unique, and so we write sad poems and books and songs, watch movies about battered women and read books about war.
This glorification of suffering bleeds into the way we consume culture as well. We force ourselves to watch and read and listen to things that are not only sad, but also boring. We assume that if we muscle through Infinite Jest, or watch Lincoln, it will be worth it. We aren’t enjoying ourselves, but that hardly seems to be the point. It’s as if the tedium and pain of being in the audience is it’s own kind of suffering, and because suffering is meaningful, that must mean that the thing we are watching or reading must also be meaningful. It’s why we sit through terrible video art in museums. But isn’t enjoying ourselves actually the entire point? Art is meant to entertain, and art that fails to be entertaining has perhaps just failed in general. Joy, delight, humor—these are braver and harder things to accomplish. Anyways, I’m trying to have more fun.
This collection is 550 pages long, which is a lot of Nora Ephron. It includes the screenplay of When Harry Met Sally, an entire novel (Heartburn, which I liked but did not love when I first read it a couple years back, and adored completely rereading it here), a series of blog posts she wrote about the Bush administration for the Huffington Post, and basically every essay she has ever previously published. It is a lot of Nora Ephron. After 550 pages, I imagined I would grow tired of her, would find her quirks tedious. But I didn’t. And that is love.
Further Reading
When I give advice to people about what book of an author’s to start with, I just end up giving them my personal chronology. If you want to get into Nora Ephron, I read I Feel Bad About My Neck first, then Heartburn, and then I Remember Nothing. If you have the opportunity, I would highly recommend listening to them as audiobooks. Nora reads her own books, which really helps perpetuate the fantasy that she is actually an old, dear friend, calling you up on the phone.