Everything Is Copy: The Life and Writing of Nora Ephron
By Elodie Barnes | On January 13, 2025 | Comments (0)

Nora Ephron (May 19, 1941–June 26, 2012) was an American screenwriter, film director, novelist, essayist, and journalist. She’s best remembered for her romantic comedy films, including When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail.
As a prolific essayist and journalist, her trademark skepticism, wit, and intimate writing style made her hugely successful, and she deserves to be remembered just as much for her prose as her screenplays.
Early life as part of a writing family
Nora was born in New York City in 1941 and had three younger sisters: Delia, Amy, and Hallie. Her parents, Henry and Phoebe, were both Broadway playwrights. At least two of their plays, Three’s A Family and Take Her, She’s Mine, were based on their family life.
When Nora was five years old, the family moved to Los Angeles. Henry and Phoebe Ephron were scriptwriters for a number of movies, including Desk Set, starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, and other classics.
All four sisters learned to read early, and dinnertime — served promptly every evening at six-thirty — was seen as an opportunity for them to learn the art of storytelling. Hallie later said that “the competition for airtime was Darwinian.” All four later became writers.
Nora’s parents regularly sent her to summer camp, where friends described her as a “natural leader.” At Camp Tocaloma in Arizona, she would entertain her friends by reading her mother’s letters from home aloud: “My friends…would laugh and listen, utterly rapt at the sophistication of it all.” These letters helped to later forge Nora’s distinctive journalistic writing style. Phoebe told her to write essays and columns as if she were mailing a letter, and then “tear off the salutation.”
The phrase “everything is copy,” which later became synonymous with Nora herself, was also attributed to her mother and this period of letter writing. Later, Nora explained what she believed her mother had meant by it: “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh, so you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.”
Both Henry and Phoebe battled with alcoholism. Biographer Kristin Marguerite Doidge wrote that this was “…a lifelong journey [for Nora], understanding how someone you love and admire and look up to can also be falling apart, how to love someone who isn’t just one thing.” The complexities of love in all its forms were later a major theme in her work.
Choosing not to be a lady: Wellesley College
Nora graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in political science but felt that her experiences there didn’t prepare her for life in any meaningful way. It certainly did nothing to prepare her for life as a woman in the modern world.
Later, she wrote, “It always seemed so sad that a school that could have done so much for women put so much energy into the one area women should be educated out of … What do you think? What is your opinion? No one ever asked.”
Doidge wrote that Nora was “critical of her classmates at Wellesley for what she perceived as a lack of toughness, an unwillingness to fight for better conditions for women. I think she also found it silly that that was a thing at all. She had a complicated relationship with the concept of feminism.”
In 1996, when Nora was invited to give the commencement address at Wellesley, she told the students: “Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.”
Achieving an ambition: New York City and journalism
After a stint working as an intern in the White House when John F. Kennedy was president (which she later wrote about in an essay, “Me and JFK: Now It Can Be Told”), she moved back to New York City, renting a series of small apartments and working in the typing pool at Newsweek.
She had plans to become a fully-fledged journalist, with dreams of following in the footsteps of Dorothy Parker, who she had first met as a child at one of her parents’ Hollywood parties. “All I wanted in this world,” she later wrote, “was to come up to New York and be Dorothy Parker. The funny lady. The only lady at the table.” This dream was soon punctured when she read more of Parker’s work, and found it to be “so embarrassing … Before one looked too hard at it, it was a lovely myth.”
She has always read constantly throughout her life, but particularly during this time: Doidge describes her curling up “on her new, wide-wale corduroy couch with a cup of hot tea and her dog-eared paperback copy of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.” Reading, for Nora, was not just for pleasure; it was also an education in the art of learning how to read people, how to interpret life onto the page, and how to make her writing her own.
Her chance came in 1962 when the newspapers went on strike, and every major paper in New York was shut down. Nora’s friend Victor Navasky, an editor, took the opportunity to print parodies of some of the papers and asked Nora if she would write a parody of a New York Post gossip column. Nora did it so well that it caught the attention of the Post’s publisher, Dorothy Schiff, who offered Nora her first job as a staff reporter. “If they can parody the Post,” she said, “they can write for it.”
Later, Nora wrote of her first weeks on the job: “The city room is dusty, dingy and dark. The desks are dilapidated and falling apart. It smells terrible. There aren’t enough phones … I am hired permanently. I have never been happier. I have achieved my life’s ambition, and I am twenty-two years old.”
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Everything is copy: essays and articles
In 1970 Nora moved from the Post to Esquire, where she remained a writer until 1989. Her essays were hugely popular — her style (described by Rachel Syme in The New Yorker as “light, fizzy, precise”) and her sense of intimacy with readers made her a hit, even when her sharpness verged on cruelty.
This sharpness was characteristic of all of her writing, even her later screenplays: Meg Ryan, who worked with Nora on When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail, said: “Her allegiance to language was sometimes more than her allegiance to someone’s feelings.”
She wrote on diverse topics, universal and personal — politics, relationships, feminism, aging, and waxing. She recommended bikini waxes, but only if you were actually wearing a bikini. She implored the reader to employ the breathing exercises commonly taught in prenatal classes: “I recommend them highly, although not for childbirth, for which they are virtually useless.”
She also devoted entire essay to handbags, which she did not recommend in the slightest: “This is for women whose purses are a morass of loose TicTacs, solitary Advils, lipsticks without tops, Chapsticks of unknown vintage, little bits of tobacco even though there has been no smoking going on for at least ten years … This is for those of you who understand, in short, that your purse is, in some absolutely horrible way, you.”
Food was also a favorite topic. In the essay “Serial Monogamy: a Memoir” she scrutinized the “fancy” cooking of the 1960s, particularly her own fascination with the famous food writers of the time.
“We all began to cook in a wildly neurotic and competitive way,” she wrote. “We were looking for applause, we were constantly performing, we were desperate to be all things to all people. Was this the grand climax of the post–World War II domestic counterrevolution or the beginning of a pathological strain of feminist overreaching? No one knew. We were too busy slicing and dicing.”
Her essays were later collected into books, including Wallflower at the Orgy (1970), Crazy Salad (1975), and Scribble, Scribble (1978).
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Heartbreak and Heartburn
Nora married Dan Greenburg in the mid-1960s; they separated in 1974. She married Carl Bernstein two years later. She discovered that he was cheating on her with a mutual friend (Margaret Jay) while she was pregnant. Her first novel, Heartburn, is a thinly veiled account of their separation and subsequent divorce.
The protagonist, Rachel, is a food writer; recipes scattered throughout the narrative. Nora had longed for someone to include her original recipes in a cookbook but realized that “no one was ever going to put my recipes into a book, so I’d have to do it myself.”
The recipes in Heartburn include pears with lima beans, cheesecake, bacon hash, and key lime pie (which Rachel ultimately throws in her cheating husband’s face). Nora later wrote:
“The point wasn’t about the recipes. The point (I was starting to realize) was about putting it together. The point was about making people feel at home, about finding your own style, whatever it was, and committing to it. The point was about giving up neurosis where food was concerned. The point was about finding a way that food fit into your life.”
Heartburn was a bestseller, and Nora wrote the screenplay for the film adaption. Released in 1986, it starred Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, and was directed by Mike Nichols.
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Success in screenwriting
Heartburn wasn’t Nora’s first screenplay or film. She had started writing scripts in the early days after her divorce from Bernstein, when she was single, broke, and living with two young children in an apartment owned by her editor.
She discovered that scriptwriting allowed her to combine everything that she loved about her essay writing and journalism – observing people, dissecting them, understanding them – while also allowing her to stay in one place and work from home.
Her first film, Silkwood (1983), was co-written with Alice Arlen. It was based on the true story of Karen Silkwood, a union activist who died while investigating safety violations at a nuclear plant. Her big Hollywood breakthrough came in 1989, when she wrote the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally. The film was a huge hit, and Nora received a BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay and an Oscar nomination.
Nora made her directorial debut in 1992 with the film This is My Life, and also co-wrote the script with her sister Delia Ephron. Further hits included Sleepless in Seattle (1993), You’ve Got Mail (1998; also co-written with Delia), and Julie and Julia (2009). Rachel Syme has described her films as “physically chaste but rhetorically hot … the idea of swooning over someone’s syntax so dramatically that you change your life appears again and again in Ephron’s work.”
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Nicholas Pileggi & Nora Ephron in 2010
photo by David Shankbone courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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Considering the Alternative and last projects
Nora’s third and final marriage was to Nicholas Pileggi (author of Goodfellas and Casino) in 1987. They remained married until her death.
She continued to write for theatre, and published two further collections of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006) and I Remember Nothing (2010). I Feel Bad About My Neck reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction.
In one essay in that collection, “Consider the Alternative,” Nora turned a wry, poignant eye to the topic of aging, writing that “… the honest truth is that it’s sad to be over sixty. The long shadows are everywhere … A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes … There are, in short, regrets.”
She was diagnosed with myelodysplasia in 2006 but chose not to reveal her diagnosis to anyone beyond her immediate family. Her death in 2012 at the age of seventy-one was caused by pneumonia, a complication of leukemia.
The legacy of Nora Ephron
Beyond the obvious legacy of her films – still big hits and hugely popular – Nora’s essays and other writings continue to inspire countless readers, women in particular. In her new introduction to I Feel Bad About My Neck, Dolly Alderton said that through her writing, Nora was “the best friend every woman longs for – shrewd, hilarious and utterly unimpeachable, equal parts Dorothy Parker, Coco Chanel and Mrs. Beeton.”
The Most of Nora Ephron — a collection of her newspaper columns, blog posts, speeches and other works — was published posthumously in 2013, and in 2016 her son, Jacob Bernstein, directed an HBO film of her life, titled Everything is Copy.
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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris.
More about Nora Ephron
Biography and criticism
- Nora Ephron: A Life by Kristin Marguerite Doidge (2022)
- Nora Ephron At The Movies by Ilana Kaplan (2024)
Books by Nora Ephron (selected)
- Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women (1975)
- Scribble, Scribble: Notes on the Media (1978)
- Heartburn (1983)
- I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron (2006)
- I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections by Nora Ephron (2010)
- The Most of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron (2013)
- Heartburn by Nora Ephron (year)
Films and interviews
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