The writer whose cookery blog was turned into a hit film by the director Nora Ephron – who died last week – salutes her inspirational heroine
Nora Ephron, who died on Tuesday at 71, was an age weirdly both far too young and far older than the one I had in my head. I didn't know her well, but, when we did meet, I found myself most often gobsmacked by a one-two combo of admiration and intimidation. The first time was when she was beginning work on the script for Julie & Julia. She came out to Queens because she wanted to see the apartment where I had lived during the time I was blogging about Julia Child. We no longer lived in that hellhole, thank God, but it had been standing empty since we moved out, so I persuaded the landlady to let us in. Nora took no notes that day, but, if you see the movie, the apartment depicted is, though Ephronised – ie, with a rooftop view of Manhattan and a higher general standard of taste – essentially the same. (The kitchen is actually smaller in the on-screen version, a fact Nora was exceedingly proud of.) After that tour, we took the subway back into the city to have lunch. On the way, she disillusioned me as to the intellectual prowess of a long-standing celebrity crush of mine, because she could and because it's important, I think she felt, to have no illusions in life.
Lunch was at Balthazar, where all the waiters knew her. As soon as we sat down, she pulled out my entire blog, printed out on pink paper, a tower of it more than a foot tall, and slashed with highlighter. For the next two hours, she proceeded to grill me on what felt like every page of it. Did this really happen? Was I bullshitting here? She relentlessly picked my work of a year apart, searching out honesty, wit, story, the kernels that would bring it all to life on screen. She paused only long enough to make food orders so Sally-esque that I thought she was pulling my leg. She wasn't.
Once she returned to her office and began creating her script and her movie – and it was, clearly and to the good, her movie; a Nora Ephron joint all the way – I saw little of her. I visited the set once, briefly. At the wrap party we disagreed about Cormac McCarthy's The Road, though she had not read it. "I'm not interested in apocalypse stories," she said casually, which made my inner geek squeak in indignation, though I said nothing because I have none of Nora's willingness to state something for myself, without cringe or equivocation. (I wonder now if the end of the world didn't just seem a bit of a silly thing to worry about, to her.) I didn't see her again until Julie & Julia was coming out. We were both invited to a panel of journalists and bloggers to discuss the film. During the Q&A, someone asked me if I had indeed lived over a pizzeria, as the movie depicts. I gently corrected the notion: I had, in fact, lived over a diner.
Nora was beyond surprised, nearly irate. "No, it was a pizza place!"
"Um, no. It was Papa Johnny's Diner. He was Greek."
"I don't believe that!"
"I lived there."
We laughed it off, but she never really believed me, and I found myself racking my mind afterwards, to see if I could somehow have been mistaken.
This is what happens; it's the privilege of those who tell the stories. I had told my story, my way; Nora told it again, her way, and it had become, at least in part, hers. It's what we all do, as writers, as artists. Nora and I shared a story now. Which is not always a comfortable thing. But she had become a teller of the story.
I love many of Nora's movies; if you don't consider When Harry Met Sally… a classic, you have lost your heart somewhere along the way. Mostly, though, I have always been a fan of her writing. I was in college when I first read Heartburn, her slightly fictionalised account of the break-up of her marriage to Carl Bernstein, and it's not understatement to say these lines came to define what I wanted to be as a writer: "If I throw this pie at him, he will never love me. But he doesn't love me anyway. So I can throw the pie if I want to."
I love this line because she took the worst moment of her life and made it funny. But there's more to it than that. This is about much more than a philandering husband and a tossed key lime pie. It's a manifesto, really. Because people can leave you, you can get old and lose your looks (though Nora never did), you can get leukaemia and die when there is still so much left for you to do. That's the hard truth. It's also freedom, in a way. As a definition of an artist, you could do much worse.
When Julia Child died, in 2004, I wrote of her: "I have no claim over the woman at all, unless it's the claim one who has nearly drowned has over the person who pulled her out of the ocean." My line about Julia Child made it into the movie, sort of…
Julie: I was drowning and she pulled me out of the ocean.
Eric: Don't get carried away.
I won't lie: I resented that dampening of the poetic soar by a sensible husband. But now I like to think of it – and she would probably not approve of this flight of fancy either – as Nora's advice to me.
Life is made up of small things, some of them unpleasant. Take them for what they are, carry on, save yourself – no one else really can – and savour the small things that are good. Dinner parties. A blow-out for your hair twice a week. A really good hot dog.
And throw the pie if you want to.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jul/01/nora-ephron-appreciation-julie-powell
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