The mind reels. In this epic annus horribilis—when we’re all taking Silkwood showers after shopping for groceries, and emailing people far and wide like we’re in You’ve Got Mail—what, indeed, would Nora do?
For one, I wonder, would she wait things out in Manhattan, scoffing at those who fled, or would she have hied to East Hampton in February and scoffed at the people who finally followed her? (Yes, it would be well within her right to go back and forth, but just play along here.)
Would she, like Jill Kargman, declare herself a “Cuomo-sexual”? Or would she assiduously remind us that not so long ago, when we thought of the governor at all, he figured as a boorish moderate whom not a small number of people hoped to replace with Cynthia Nixon?
She was a noted gastronome, disguising herself as a food writer in Heartburn, adapting books by Julia Child and the author Julie Powell into 2009’s Julie & Julia, and constantly referencing favorite recipes, dishes, and food-world conspiracies in her essays. (From one: “I have friends who eat egg-white omelettes. Every time I’m forced to watch them eat egg-white omelettes, I feel bad for them. In the first place, egg-white omelettes are tasteless. In the second place, the people who eat them think they are doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed.”) How would she mourn her favorite restaurants? What would she think of the neatly staggered line into Zabar’s? And of the sudden, collective obsession with sourdough starter, and—God help us— banana bread?
Where would she land on the shuttered salons? Would she out her rich, uptown friends for booking under-the-table treatments, or delight us with a yarn about trying and failing to find someone to cut her hair? (As she wrote in 2005, “Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.”)
Hers was a very specific point of view (she was white, Wellesley-educated, secular Jewish), but somehow, it almost always seemed inarguably correct—to her fans as to her friends. “Nora would find the perfect thing to eat or drink or root for, and we would all follow suit,” wrote Sally Quinn just after Ephron’s death. “One summer, it was champagne grapes. Another year, it was Campari and blood-orange juice. Another, it was tres leches shipped in ice from an Austin restaurant. It was relaxing, really.”
To read her now is rather relaxing, too. After all this time, I still don’t know when I’ll next ride the subway, or hug my sister, or see the Sargent portraits at the Met. But I do know exactly how Nora Ephron spent her Sunday mornings; how she felt about Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Bill Clinton; how to make her Beef Borscht; and that, if When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail are anything to go by, she believed in happy endings.