R.I.P. Nora Ephron.
Her death is such a shock because she insisted on keeping her illness a secret from all but her closest friends. She was brought up to be stoic and roll with the punches. And with luck, turn them into comedy.
Here's a wonderful obit by Ariel Levy in the
New Yorker. The piece also has a link to Levy's 2009 profile of Ephron with this telling paragraph:
Ephron and her sisters were brought up with the knowledge that moaning and complaining were . . . boring. Their parents “simply had no interest whatsoever in your sorrows,” Ephron said... “It was so ‘Someday this will be a funny story,’ ” Ephron continued, “so ‘I’m not interested. I’m having a drink and smoking a cigarette, and what else is new?’ I think if you learn over and over from your parents that you do not get love from wallowing in heartbreak or failure, then you don’t really have much of a habit of doing it.”
New Yorker
And from the
New York Times:
Several years ago, Ms. Ephron learned that she had myelodysplastic syndrome, a pre-leukemic condition, but she kept the illness a secret from all but a few intimates and continued to lead a busy, sociable life.
“She had this thing about not wanting to whine,” the writer Sally Quinn said on Tuesday. “She didn’t like self-pity. It was always, you know, ‘Suck it up.’ ”
Another friend, Robert Gottlieb, who had edited her books since the 1970s, said that her death would be “terrible for her readers and her movie audience and her colleagues.” But “the private Nora was even more remarkable,” he added, saying she was “always there for you with a full heart plus the crucial dose of the reality principle.”
Ms. Streep called her a “stalwart.”
“You could call on her for anything: doctors, restaurants, recipes, speeches, or just a few jokes, and we all did it, constantly,” she wrote in her e-mail. “She was an expert in all the departments of living well.”
NY Times Obit
She either wrote or directed (or both) some of my favorite movies.
