Remembering Ms. Ephron.

I will readily admit that I was not in love with most of Ms. Ephron’s work. I hated Sleepless in Seattle, found You’ve Got Mail nauseating, and thought Bewitched was the perfect cure for insomnia. In an old blog post, I likened her to Tyler Perry. In my defense, I was two-months post partum and hated everything.

Then I watched Heartburn…again, and laughed. And cried. And cried some more.

Heartburn is the fictionalized account of Ephron’s tumultuous marriage to journalism legend Carl Bernstein. In it, she discovers he’s having an affair, leaves him, takes him back, and then leaves him again in a ceremonious fashion that had me laughing for at least 10 minutes. Heartbreaking in its honesty, Heartburn was a story that nearly every woman could relate to. It appealed to my cynicism. Validated it. What happens when you fall in love with someone knowing that it’s doomed to fail? What happens when the ardor cools and you find yourself alone, left with nothing but a carton of Rocky Road and your shame? That Ephron was brave enough to bare all–much to her ex-husband’s dismay–is pretty fucking ballsy.

It is that bravery, that no-holds-barred honesty that will leave me (and scores of other women writers) forever in her debt.

Her passion, acerbic wit, and verbal dexterity were all things to be envied, and will certainly be missed.

“Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it.” – Nora Ephron