Nora Ephron (1941-2012)

During the tortuous years of my adolescence — ah well, it’s an oxymoron of sorts, everyone’s adolescence is tortuous, except, perhaps, Sid Mallya’s (but it shall not do to digress) — in the tortuous years I spent wracked between growing pimples and growing lovesick, I was heavily into tragedy. The only kind of books and movies I classified as great in my head had devastating endings. I shed copious tears, and subsequently retired with a grand sense of tremulous sorrow and reflected, in our little fourth-floor balcony edged by a mango tree, on the finality of its unassailable beauty. So, Macbeth and Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak and Love Story and Mill on the Floss. I was vocal in my opinion that Charles Dickens, in changing the original end of Great Expectations to a silly, happy-ish bargain, had made a tremendous mistake.

Thankfully, I outgrew this phase in my early 20s. The first reason behind this was the utter failure of a play I directed in college, in an edgy tyrannical directorial vein — my great magnum opus — based loosely on a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri. It was about a couple who had lost their baby; their marriage was breaking down; their days were miserable; they were trapped in their own private hells. It was very intense and sad and grown-up. It was called Solo though it was not a solo. You know? It failed spectacularly.

The second reason, one might say in a fashion, was Nora Ephron.

(From top) You’ve Got Mail, Julie & Julia and When Harry Met Sally

Nora Ephron might be best-known for the thudding successes of her most popular films When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail and Julie & Julia, but that is only one minor part of her oeuvre. Nora Ephron was a glorious, glorious woman. (I cannot stress this enough.)

Writer, director, journalist, essayist, even novelist (though Heartburn was more a thinly veiled autobiography with recipes), foodie and humorist. She wore many hats — and then some more. Feminist, but without the attendant self-righteousness. Blogger. Playwright. Her latest play with sister Delia was the off-Broadway success Love, Loss and What I Wore. Fabulous cook; treasurer of cookbooks.

Born to screenwriters and eccentrics, Henry and Phoebe Ephron, and brought up in Los Angeles, Nora and her three sisters were all expected to, in one way or the other, be writers. (They all did, successfully.)

And it’s interesting how in many of her movies the heroine is obsessed with words. Meryl Streep in the cinematic version of Heartburn, the autobiographical novel that recalled her harrowing divorce with Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, is a food writer. Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, the film which got her her second Academy Award nomination for original screenplay, is a journalist. (In one of the most memorable moments in the movie, Harry says, “You were going to be a gymnast.” Sally replies, “A journalist.” Harry says, “Right, that’s what I said.”) In You’ve Got Mail, Meg Ryan as the gorgeous Kathleen Kelly is owner of a bookstore for children — The Shop Around the Corner — and subsequently, after the shop has to close down, becomes a children’s writer. Julie Powell in Julie & Julia is a blogger. In the film, both Julie and the legendary Julia Child are shown to come close to their dreams: publish books.

But it’s not the poetic justice of writing heroines writing themselves happy endings that makes Ephron so important; it is, instead, the powerful if quirky realism of those fairy-tale endings, the understated but trademark slight oddness that has made her the queen of rom-coms. For there is a philosophy behind the romance, after all.

And that is the most interesting thing about Nora Ephron — her stand that she would not let tragedy or sorrow define the essence of their spirit; instead, with a twist and a flourish, a joke and a wand, she would turn the pity of others into laughter. She could both be intellectual and make it funny. She used to say, “My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.”

And that is what turns her love stories into great films, this innate philosophy which she has expanded in her other writing, alongside her prescient comic timing. (Even if it means they get played in a loop on Valentine’s Day.) The complicated simplicity of happy endings; it becomes the complicity of happy endings. That can, through virtual victories, really vanquish — in complex cultural codes — the cruelties of life. In her stories, there are plenty of second chances too. And the sense that one can’t be too late to invent a new beginning. So the 36-year-old Julia Child, madly in love with her new (old) husband Paul, discovers a new passion: cooking. And the rest — as much for a 36-year-old Nora Ephron as for Julia Child — is history.

Dear Nora Ephron, thank you for making wisdom less boxy; I’m glad you showed that along with wisdom, love, loss and what we wear can come together in sudden moments of inspiration and clarity, to mean much; that philosophy too can come in comic, if mysterious, ways.

May the other side provide interesting observations too!