Along with many, many others, I'm mourning the passing of a wonderful writer, Nora Ephron. I first came to know her through the film version of her only novel, Heartburn. How I loved that film! It came out just as I finished at University and I remember watching it over and over and over; Carly Simon's haunting voice the backdrop for the breakdown of a marriage. A truly talented writer, she wrote or co-wrote many of my favourite films including Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally; I'm still searching for the high that I got when I first saw When Harry Met Sally. She had a knack for tapping into the universal themes of love and loss, happiness and grief and the extremes of emotion that go with them, not least the black humour.. one of my favourite lines from Heartburn being when Meryl Streep (playing the wife of cheating Jack Nicholson!)began to spread the lie that Nicholson's lover "Thelma Rice has herpes"..oh what sweet revenge!
More recently she wrote her infamous lists: what I will miss and what I won't. Diagnosed with leukaemia I can only guess that these lists were her way of dealing with the inevitable and she did it in her own inimitable way. She said she wouldn't miss emails, bras, mammograms or dead flowers, but would miss the christmas tree, Paris, dinner for just the two of us, taking a bath and reading in bed. It strikes me as wholly appropriate that these things are such simple pleasures; for in life, as in print, she and her characters celebrated the simple, universal things that touch us all.
We'll miss you Nora...
I leave you with a clip from my favourite film, currently winging it's way to me from Amazon
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