Thursday, June 28, 2012

Full-on humanness.

I didn't read "Heartburn." (Though now I want to.)

I wasn't even a massive fan of all of her movies.

But Nora Ephron got me. Actually, she got all of us gals, but I like to think me in particular.

I remember the first time I watched "When Harry Met Sally." It wasn't Meg Ryan's oft-quoted (wholly remembered) orgasm scene that got me. It wasn't even their arrival in New York (though as a girl I dreamed of that day for me). It was Harry's line on New Year's Eve - "when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible" - that did it for me. Nora knew. She just knew.

Those words weren't laced with complicated thought or clever innuendo or adjectives of how we should feel. Those words were simple and spot on.

In reading some of the articles and farewells following her death this week, I stumbled across one written by Virginia Heffernan at Yahoo News. This particular sentence struck me. I copied it and sent it to my sissy and my Mini Me.

Ephron rejected the "counterintuitive" -- a crude commodity among female essayists, to write the opposite of what's felt and true -- and embraced, instead, the intuitive: good food, romantic love and full-on humanness in the form of vanity and laughter and grief and dorkiness. Ephron rejected the imperative to care about things she didn't care about, or get alarmist and guilty about her pleasures.
Heffernan wrote she wished she'd had the chance to become Nora's friend. From that paragraph, sounds like she already was.