A bitingly funny, provocative and revealing look at our foibles, passions and pastimes – from the much-missed, bestselling author of I Feel Bad About My Neck and I Remember Nothing.
From her Academy Award—nominated screenplays to her bestselling fiction and essays, Nora Ephron is one of America’s most gifted, prolific, and versatile writers. In this classic collection of magazine articles, Ephron does what she does best: embrace American culture with love, cynicism, and unmatched wit. From tracking down the beginnings of the self-help movement to dressing down the fashion world’s most powerful publication to capturing a glimpse of a legendary movie in the making, these timeless pieces tap into our enduring obsessions with celebrity, food, romance, clothes, entertainment, and sex. Whether casting her ingenious eye on renowned director Mike Nichols, Cosmopolitan magazine founder Helen Gurley Brown—or herself, as she chronicles her own beauty makeover—Ephron deftly weaves her journalistic skill with the intimate style of an essayist and the incomparable talent of a great storyteller.
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.