I‘ve recently read Nora Ephron’s The Last Interview and Other Conversations (2015) and the four interviews in this slim volume struck me as inspiring and useful for writers.

Originally published—with a slightly different title—in Middle-Pause on Medium on June 14, 2024

You may know Nora Ephron from some of the best romantic comedies of the nineties. It happens, though, that she’s also one of the first famous women who made it as a freelancer — in the seventies, no less. As she says in the fourth interview, she was inspired, along with her three writer sisters, by the career of her screenwriter (and playwright) mother, Phoebe Ephron, who wrote several movies with Ephron’s father, Henry, in the forties, fifties, and sixties.

The first interview: “Nice to See Nora Happy in Her Work.”

The first interview, by Michael S. Lasky, published in Writer’s Digest in 1974, offers many intriguing tidbits of Ephron’s beginnings as a writer.

Nora Ephron first worked in the editorial office of Newsweek as support, copying and clipping articles, as Newsweek did not take on women writers at the time — something that eventually led to a class action lawsuit for sexual discrimination.

After Newsweek, she got a job as a reporter for the New York Post, where she learned the ropes but then, when the opportunity arose, couldn’t find it in her to write a column just yet. Following that, and her marriage to Dan Greenburg, another fellow writer, she jumped straight into freelancing. And she did eventually write a column — for Esquire. She also contributed to New York magazine.

From the start, she managed to make about $10,000 a year as a freelancer — which is much more than ten thousand these days, of course. But then magazines paid better in those times before the internet — in terms of offsetting the cost of living — than they do today.

Ephron said she freelanced full-time because she had gotten married to her first husband and could afford the risk, but still, she was successful from her first year. She struggled after divorcing her husband, but she kept at it.

She also got generous expense accounts and traveled a lot. And, believe it or not, for New York magazine, she did only one column a month and five longer features a year, something that only writers at the best-regarded magazines can afford to do today.

I guess the lesson is that if we want to write full-time for magazines today, we’d better find a partner to support our vocation until we can write for the New Yorker or the Smithsonian. Or else we can try writing for AARP.

When it comes to Ephron’s writing process for magazine articles, she says she would not even start a story until she had a lead. Most writers today, in contrast, focus much more on productivity and getting words on the page first and foremost.

Ephron did that too, though, in her way, revising an article up to twelve drafts, and often typing it again from the beginning in order to get back into the flow of that article. That changed when she began to use a computer, as she mentions in the fourth interview.

Of course, Ephron’s first interview takes place in the time of typewriters. All this cutting-and-pasting was not ingrained into writers’ styles. Having seen old photos of authors’ typewritten manuscripts, my sense is that you had to pretty much get the piece right the first time around, or at least get the parts in order — there was some leeway, of course, but the interlocking of thoughts was stronger in those days for many writers, even if they did, like Ephron, numerous drafts.

Okay, we trust the flow of ideas these days, too, but computers make it easier to move sentences and paragraphs around.

Still, Ephron’s insistence on finding the lead first would probably save us a lot of time and trouble when it comes to writing certain pieces, such as reports on findings from the science world or health advice. Focusing on getting the lead first would help us answer the questions of why our article would matter to our readers, how to engage them, and what major takeaway we’d like to emphasize (and then support with examples).

We can also learn from Ephron that research is a good thing, believe it or not, and not just by browsing information online. Interviews are the bread and butter of journalists — or they used to be — and perhaps we should make more use of them as well. Ephron says that she perhaps did many more interviews than necessary for her pieces. As expected, she’s funny about it too. When asked if she used a tape recorder, she says that she does, but only sometimes, since she doesn’t feel the need to listen to most of those people twice. She also mentions that she doesn’t have the patience to transcribe.

The second interview: “Feminist with a Funny Bone.”

By the time of Ephron’s second interview, by Patrick McGilligan, published in Backstory 5: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1990s in 2007, she’d had several screenwriting movie credits to her name.” She started in the industry with Silkwood (1983) and Heartburn (1986), both with Meryl Streep. By 2007, she’d done many others, including the much more famous When Harry Met Sally (1989), along with Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998) — she also directed these latter two.

You’ve Got Mail touched me at the time because Meg Ryan was one of my favorite actresses. It was only later that I realized that much of her charm in the movie had to do with the wonderful dialogue and then the framing, camera movements, and other directorial choices, including close-ups. Who can forget the scene with her waiting in a café, or when Tom Hank’s character comes to Kathleen Kelly’s bookstore?

She had the good fortune of working with Mike Nichols — of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and The Graduate (1967) fame — on Silkwood and Heartburn, and she says she learned a great deal from him.

She learned about writing from the actors, too. When the character of Meg Ryan faked an orgasm scene in a café in When Harry Met Sally, Billy Crystal’s funny response became part of the script. And then Tom Hanks, too, contributed a handsome amount to Sleepless in Seattle, including much of that radio call with a talk-show host.

The lesson here is that we should not be bound by one way of doing things, even if it may be particularly strong in a certain workplace. Screenwriters, for instance, used to look up to Paddy Chayefsky, who didn’t allow anyone to make changes to his scripts — and he had the contract for it. Ephron, however, was happy to learn on the set that she didn’t want to follow his example.

She was also lucky that her sisters were writers, particularly Delia, whom she collaborated with on several scripts. She says it was very helpful to have Delia’s help as a writer when she, Nora, directed a movie since the director’s mind pulled her in different directions.

The third interview: “‘I Remember Nothing:’ Nora Ephron on Life, Death, and Hot Dogs.”

The third interview, by Kerry Lauerman, was published in Salon in 2010. By that time Ephron had seen in print several collections of essays, including the more recent I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts About Being a Woman (2006) and I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections (2010).

These essays show her thinking more and more about death since she’d already had good friends fall ill and die. In the interview, she responds to Lauerman’s question about this new concern with her trademark humor, making a joke, for instance, about hot dogs she has FedEx’d from LA and how one should have their last meal on repeat while they’re not too ill for it, since they may not feel like having their favorite hot dogs when the time comes.

She also says something quite wise, namely that what young people don’t know about how older people feel they cannot make up in their imagination. She also adds that humans don’t excel at imagination — which is funny coming from her, a woman who set so much store by her mother’s dictum “Everything is copy,” which focused her on using her life in her writing.

Another wise thing that particularly struck me in this third interview is one of her comments about having high standards as a young person and how that correlates with how unkind you can be at times — whereas in older age, the way she phrases it, you not so much lower your standards as do away with many of them, which, in turn, probably makes you a kinder person.

One lesson for me in this third interview is that we should trust our imagination to take us places, just as we trust other people’s lives to enrich ours. And a second lesson is to be happy and thankful for having gotten older.

The fourth interview: “The Last Interview”

Then comes “The Last Interview” by Kathryn Borel, published in The Believer in March 2012. Borel starts off by asking Ephron, essentially, how she manages to keep reinventing her writing. Ephron responds by mentioning her blogging, which, she says, gave her a new format to play with and tailor her writing to since blogging is essay-style but less consequential than writing in print, and it also allows us to riff on various events of the day without the gravity that comes when we share big thoughts that define us.

Of course, things have changed since 2012 and now much substantial writing is done for the web only (and the online/print divide is not what it used to be), but I liked that observation about old-style blogging.

Ephron also seems to suggest that if it weren’t for these spur-of-the-moment excursions, our ideas would become tiresome since we would likely be repeating ourselves. She actually says that she couldn’t have done a column a week in her day — but she qualifies it by saying that she knows people who do it successfully. She jokes that when she worked as a columnist for Esquire she only had about as many original thoughts as she put in those twelve columns a year.

That got me thinking, of course, on how to expand our repertoire, and it does seem to me that we all have to find our own balance between reading, writing, and interacting with other people and the world. And that we have to seek this balance almost daily — push for it. I personally am finding in recent years a lot of inspiration in nature — not only from being in nature but also from watching various documentaries.

In terms of finding one’s voice, Ephron cautions against tackling certain projects before you’re geared for them in terms of life and professional experience as well as general approach. Other writers argue that one should always be a step — or more — ahead of one’s comfort zone, but Ephron warns against experiencing failure, as it may hurt our confidence as writers.

At the same time, Ephron herself says that she chose to begin her career in New York when she was young, so she was certainly not a shy one when it comes to taking chances. Even her job as a reporter at the New York Post was very courageous. As Borel points out, this was New York, not a small city, and, let’s not forget, this was the sixties and she was a woman. Not that women can’t be tough in a tough city, but I doubt many institutions and individuals were used to women reporters.

Ephron also tackled writing for movies quite boldly, without having much background for it — if you don’t count the lessons she probably imbibed from her parents. Yet she says she didn’t feel out of her depth — and it certainly looks like she wasn’t, judging by the results! She also says that writing magazine articles prepared her for screenwriting because she had a clear sense of how the beginning, middle, and end would flow into each other. Besides, she says she didn’t need to think consciously about structure a lot because it came naturally to her.

And then, as Borel says, she tackled fiction just as bravely. She wrote a novel — Heartburn — and a few plays.

Also, in this fourth and last interview, we learn that shaking up one’s writing style a bit won’t hurt — on the contrary, it may produce nice results. Ephron, for instance, often preferred to work on a movie script alone. She says she couldn’t have done When Harry Met Sally otherwise. Yet she collaborated with her sister Delia on a You’ve Got Mail, and as Delia liked doing long outlines, Nora Ephron, too, tried this new — new to her — writing process. And I think most of us can agree that You’ve Got Mail is a beauty.

In fact, I feel that’s the biggest lesson Nora Ephron left us with: find your voice, yes, but, also, take that voice in many directions bravely. She wrote magazine articles in her twenties, in her thirties she began to work for movies, first as a screenwriter and then as a director, and later on she also turned her attention to plays, probably because she now had experience with the performing arts and also because her sister Delia had become interested in playwriting as well. They did the famous Love, Loss, and What I Wore together, a play based on the eponymous novel by Ilene Beckerman.

Of course, it may have helped that the sisters came from a family of writers and that their destiny as writers was instilled in them from an early age, but, as Nora Ephron’s story shows, if you wade your way into the world of writing, you may reach some beautiful places. It also proves that if you work hard to find your voice, the rest will come easier. And, most of all, it conveys the sense that all is possible if you remember to hope for the best, dedicate the right amount of time to each stage of your growth as a writer, and, last but not least, have fun with it all!

To a happier, healthier life,

Mira