Nora Ephron: The Last Interview

& Other Conversations

Packed with her characteristic wit, wisdom, and charm, this collection of interviews with Nora Ephron celebrates one of the most beloved voices in American film and letters. Ranging from her days as a writer for Esquire and New York—well before Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle catapulted her to stardom—to her very last interview, this collection shines a spotlight on the life and work of a dazzling talent.

 

NORA EPHRON was born in Manhattan in 1941 and grew up in Beverly Hills. Her parents were Broadway playwrights, who would base the play Take Her, She’s Mine on letters she sent home from Wellesley College. After graduation, Ephron became a journalist, writing for the New York Post, New York magazine, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Cosmopolitan, and Esquire, where her 1972 piece “A Few Words About Breasts” made her a household name as an essayist. Her marriage to and subsequent divorce from Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein inspired her first novel, Heartburn, which was published in 1983 and later became a movie starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing for the films Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle, and her essay collection I Feel Bad About My Neck was a number-one New York Times bestseller. She died in New York City in 2012, at the age of seventy-one.

“I devoured her prose, her other film offerings, and became a fangirl right along with my mother, aunt, grandmother, and every other intelligent woman in the tristate area . . . her life informs the entirety of mine.” —Lena Dunham, The New Yorker

“A brilliant, restless mind.” —Ms.

 “Funny, shrewd, devastating.” —Newsweek

 “She was someone who lived, and who people who never met her felt like they knew. And that, I think, gives a clue as to why she will last. Because in the great rushing loneliness of the world, when a writer’s voice makes you feel befriended, you want more of it even after the person is gone.” —Meg Wolitzer, NPR

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