Like the others, I met Nora Ephron, not knowing that she was the girl to whom she belonged as the author of the simulated orgasm scene in the restaurant from the movie When Harry Met Sally. A small piece of immortality in the relentless production machine of US cinema, where writers are like sweaty workers in their underwear. The ultimate reality is hidden behind a chain of simulations.
Then I took another look at an article published in Ephron on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. There, he told me, when he was an avid student of Kennedy, he learned that the candidate would visit the support committee. Gun wax, hairdressing session followed by manicure session and wardrobe visit. In the end, they shook hands unpleasantly: not an expensive kiss, or at least not a sensual glance. Nothing. Nora was Jewish and the Kennedy patriarch was a Roman Catholic Irish gangster.
With his first offer to work for a newspaper in New York, which he loved so much (he settled here at the first opportunity, and it wasn’t easy: traffic signals pushed him towards New Jersey and his street was taken over by the Neapolitans because it was Sant Antoni del Porquet), before long, that is, journalism. He had to understand in the depths of his soul whether he loved the journalists or rather the journalists. In any case, he adopted the unhealthy habits of the guild and his unique sense of alarm and urgency, five minutes before turning off the pressure, before fleeing a profession that would evolve into forms of growing arrogance, smugness, and yet zero effectiveness: you can only experience something similar in a submarine German.
All of this is described by the author in I Remember Nothing, a valuable collection of texts recovered by the Libros del asteroid.
humor, tenderness, sensuality
In the piece that opens the selection, he laments his increasing desire to forget and his forgetfulness. It wasn’t Alzheimer’s (or what came before, yes man, that’s what I told you), but it was almost a way of being in the world. It was at the Washington march that Norman Mailer gave him for a 300-page story in The Armies of the Night, but he “wouldn’t be able to take a few paragraphs” and how would they go to bed with a woman. lawyer almost all day.
The truth is that Nora belongs to the minority of “liberal Jews who continue to call what the rest of Americans call the living room the study.”
Parents who occasionally caught some co-op or wrote comedy were consumed by alcohol at different rates, with more noise in the mother’s case.
Ephron had talent and a sense of humor and wrote the screenplay for his best-known film, fueled by the trauma of being left out of his family legacy. Although her efforts as a pastry chef aroused her interest in good nutrition, she struggled to get a family of unknown blood relatives and friends gathered at the same table, hence the movie Julia and Julie.
Whoever is slightly older than a teenager is well-deserved as a comedian if he’s ever been able to do “parodic journalism” for an amateur newspaper called Monocle. Comparisons have been made with Woody Allen, who are often and unfairly on both sides, each for different reasons. Nora was less cold-blooded and more vicious, penniless on a Mongolian horse.
Other titles such as Monocle and The Plague of New York or Outdated News also declined, but the young writer persisted.
At one point, Nora says that Larry King has never read a book in his life. With eight marriages—consecutive polygamy—how would he enter another non-judicial prose?
In I Remember Nothing, the self-help lists that often hang on the door on year-end eve are deftly caricatured of the well-wishers genre. The lists of inclusion and exclusion, love or hate priorities are hilarious and at one point shocking. By the way, he tells about the dangers of teflon – pan coating – and cake making techniques, I don’t remember which one.
Despite being the daughter of intellectuals in the service of Hollywood and a liberal family—which brings you closer to Belcebú itself in the United States whether you like it or not—she had to accept work as a ganapán, endure macho politics. It’s Newsweek’s first, where interns basically get a little slapped, pick up newspaper clippings, and eat the brown ones for the reporter.
Although the book is short, or for that very reason, it shows us a character filled with content and hard-won wisdom. It comes down to having a privileged relationship with the legendary Lillian Pelman—including Dashiell Hammett—a relationship that, I say, Hellman, ends because everything is and we are all mortal: when the famous writer insists on setting the beats and even intervening. the marital problems of the young disciple who took his own in the form of a seed.
If Nora Ephron had even remotely participated in one of the imbecile rituals of gender politics and fluid sexes, she would conclude that we should fuck more and stop confusing meat with theorems and anthropology with lubricant, amen.