SHE FELT BAD ABOUT HER NECK

Nora Ephron, the imaginary friend

Two things were notable about the landslide of tributes that followed Nora Ephron’s death at age 71 in 2012 after a long fight with cancer. The first was the sheer volume and heartfelt quality of the sentiments. According to Frank Rich in the New York Times, her passing led to nearly twenty articles or blogposts in his own paper, more than a dozen in Newsweek or The Daily Beast, and six in The New Yorker, plus too many others to even count. Presidents and Popes do not command this volume of coverage, never mind a writer best known for humorous essays and romantic comedy films. The authors of many of these accounts seemed to treat her death not as the passing of a well-known writer but a deeply affecting personal loss, as if she were a beloved family member. To others, including many who had never even met her, Ephron’s life seemed to model an existence they could only dream of attaining. Lisa Taddeo in Esquire said Ephron, “should remind you of what you can hope to be, if you cast the bullshit aside and say what’s on your mind and feel what’s in your heart.” At the Huffington Post Sara Wilson said, reading her, “I felt like a smarter, funnier, older and much more sophisticated version of myself—and I never wanted to leave.” Novelist Tom Chiarella said, “I never wanted to be a journalist. What I wanted, and I knew this by the time I was 30, was to be Nora Ephron.” A fan’s statement nails it best: “Oh, Nora, there is only one like you. Why did you have to do such a stupid thing and go die????”

Equally notable was that almost none of the fanboys and girls called her a great writer. (Stephen Marche did call her a “great novelist, great screenwriter, great playwright, great columnist, great interview,” which is so swoony and over the top it’s almost self-refuting.) Most of the idolaters understood literary greatness was neither Ephron’s game, nor what they wanted. “I was paralyzed by admiration,” said Joan Juliet Buck of the Daily Beast. “She’d scattered the culture with markers that will forever be hers.” Which may be nearer the point. More than a decade after Nora Ephron’s death, the style of rhetoric she practiced has achieved something like default status as a certain kind of public voice, even by writers with zero interest in humorous essays. Read the following passages; see if you can guess which one was written by Ephron:

“I do not plan to have another wedding; I’m standing pat at two. But I must confess that after spending a pleasant hour gazing at the photographs in the newest crop of wedding guides, I began to feel a bit of the old itch.”

“Other people’s loves are like other people’s dreams—boring and incomprehensible to observers. Or so I thought when I first navigated to Rachel’s profile, knowing that she was the person for whom Adam had left me. I clicked through beaches she’d visited and lumpy cakes she’d baked, passages she’d underlined and toddlers she’d tickled. Her bookshelf jutted into the background of a few photos, and when I zoomed in and squinted, I could make out a row of mint-colored Penguin Classics. An earlier, non-Adam boyfriend still liked some of her photos, which I knew because I clicked not only through her pictures but also through the profiles of the all people who had liked them, through their photos, through the profiles of the people who had liked those, and so on, until at last I found myself hunched over my phone at five in the morning, staring at pictures of Rachel’s ex-boyfriend’s third-grade teacher’s tomato garden.”

“As a very young writer I fashioned myself a nascent intellectual, someone who read Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes and kept a notebook of pertinent quotes to be lingered over or tossed into a piece of my own writing when the spirit moved me. I was not, mind you, averse to reading Seventeen or Glamour; I was a sucker for Bonne Bell astringent and Revlon Blush-on, both of which advertised in their pages, and I still remember all these years later the name of Seventeen’s reigning, dewy-skinned model, Colleen Corby. But I wouldn’t have dreamed of actually turning my writing talents to these magazines—in part out of literary snobbism, and in part because I felt like an outsider in the cheerleader world they represented, where jock boyfriends were all-important and girls were eternally straightening their hair on rollers the size of soup cans.”

If you guessed “none of them,” congratulations; you win a $25.00 savings bond. (For the record, #1 is Caitlin Flanagan, #2 Becca Rothfeld, #3 Daphne Merkin) None of these writers, surely, were trying to imitate Ephron. But if you’re an Ephron fan, the fact that you had to guess, that you might have been fooled for a second, by itself makes it worth trying to understand how this way of evoking (or performing?) the self in print became such an archetype. Was it something in the water? What role did Ephron play? Was it viral, with Ephron acting as a superspreader? What purpose does it serve for so many writers? Why did Ephron’s many admirers seem to treat her writing as an addiction, or one of those psychological experiments in which lab rats are trained to press a lever that stimulates the pleasure center in their brain and keep pressing and pressing and pressing till they drop dead of exhaustion rather than stop for sleep or food?

Anyone who inspires this kind of worship should automatically be presumed guilty (of something, anyway) until proven innocent, but understanding exactly what Ephron was guilty of requires a deep dive into the sources of her writing as well as its appeal. After reading through the majority of Ephron’s sprawling output recently, I can report she was sometimes capable of more than the addictive style for which she was best known. But only sometimes. Learning about her background also convinced me that while her writing wasn’t simply the product of her biography, the broad outlines are suggestive. Ephron began life as a princess, born into royalty, but royalty of a very provisional kind: a Hollywood brat whose sophisticated, glamorous parents, Phoebe and Henry Ephron, functioned as a successful screenwriting team from the 1940s through the 1960s. Growing up among producers, directors, actors and writers gave her an intimate look at the inner workings and day-to-day life of Hollywood, a chance to absorb through her pores how popular entertainments were made, which is to say how talented and skilled craftsmen, through sweat and struggle, could create appealing illusions that seduced millions of people—as well as the many ways those efforts could go wrong. That the experience wasn’t lost on her is evidenced by her own writing, which frequently feels disillusioned without losing the hope and possibility that the world could be a larger-than-life, romantic place:

“Just before I’d moved to New York, two historic events had occurred: The birth control pill had been invented, and the first Julia Child cookbook was published. As a result, everyone was having sex, and when the sex was over, you cooked something.”

“The two of us went to a bistro, and the Kelly bag was placed in the center of the table, where it sat like a small shrine to a shopping victory. And then, outside, it began to rain. My friend’s eyes began to well with tears. Her lips closed tightly. In fact, to be completely truthful, her lips actually pursed.  It was pouring rain and she hadn’t had the Kelly bag waterproofed. She would have to sit there all afternoon and wait for the rain to end rather than expose the bag to a droplet of moisture. It crossed my mind that she and her Kelly bag might have to sit there forever.”

The sparks generated between these two opposing qualities frequently give the writing an ironic tone, like two subcritical masses of uranium combining to generate nuclear fission. A beckoning pull that isn’t unlike the allure of the Hollywood movies her parents wrote for a living. That these tinseled dreams ended badly for both parents, her mother dying of alcohol poisoning at 57, her father succumbing to dementia, may also have contributed to the way illusion, disillusion and irony remain tightly intertwined in so much of her writing. Ephron was fond of repeating her mother’s aphorism: “Everything is copy.” Meaning nothing in life is wasted, anything can be redeemed, even life’s grubbiest, most humiliating moments, so long as you can write about them interestingly. Few pieces of parental advice can possibly have been more influential. But (the Hollywood influence again) Ephron took for granted that this meant writing for popular audiences. She had no interest in formal literary experiments or obscure meanings; everything was crafted to engage. You turn the pages of an Ephron essay eagerly and easily. You smile or laugh. You never wonder, never need to guess what she’s trying to say. Matt Weinstock called it “the defining tic” of her career.

If you want to see Ephron at her most characteristic, you could read “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” the 2003 essay on the indignities of aging after which this essay is named.

“If you saw my neck, you might feel bad about it too, but you’d probably be too polite to let on.”

“We all look good for our age. Except for the necks. Oh, the necks. There are chicken necks. There are turkey gobbler necks. There are elephant necks. There are…”

This has exactly the Ephronisms readers expected, not only the playful breeziness but the comic exaggeration, the confessional tone, the expressions of vulnerability, insecurity, envy or embarrassment (but mostly about personal, rarely about public issues), the oversharing of intimate details to create a sense of bond with readers (who could not, of course share back).

“It’s great to be wise and sage and mellow; it’s great to be at the point where you understand just what matters in life. I can’t stand people who say things like this. What can they be thinking? Don’t they have necks?”

This has a wonderful sense of release, doesn’t it? Utterly indifferent to verifiable fact, it resembles the playful, irresponsible things friends permit themselves to say privately to each other, a delicious momentary holiday from high-minded attitudes into the lowness of taboo feelings and shameful admissions.

Even in her teen years, Ephron yearned to be a journalist. After a fact-checking job at Newsweek, she began her writing career as a reporter at the New York Post pursuing whatever short-term assignments her editors handed out but also finding enough freedom to write stories that explored multiple aspects of the city she loved and where she felt most at home (she never really liked Los Angeles, where she grew up). She later wrote about these newsroom years with affection for what the discipline of fast-deadline writing and reporting (as well as several keen-eyed editors) had taught her, without ever disguising the dinginess of the Post’s working environment or the cheapness of Dorothy Schiff, the Post’s publisher in the pre-Murdoch days. Romance and disillusion again.

When Ephron began regularly writing essays for Esquire the 1970s, she must have felt a pull toward the world of quality journalism, or perhaps the editors wanted someone who could write about women’s issues for a male audience. Perhaps both. Something about these circumstances, writing for a primarily male audience about issues that interested her as a woman may have shaped the way she used tone to convey an attitude. The breezy, flippant tone of such articles as “A Few Words About Breasts,” employs humor to talk about what was beginning to be called “the male gaze.” This mixture of serious ideas and low comedy probably went a long way to make her acceptable to Esquire’s male readers (and editors) who might have responded to a humorless essay about men’s attitudes toward women’s bodies with defensiveness. How can you be defensive toward someone who says:

“I would sit in the bathtub and look down at my breasts and know that any day now, any second now, they would start growing like everyone else’s. They didn’t. ‘I want to buy a bra,’ I said to my mother one night. ‘What for?’ she said. My mother was really hateful about bras, and by the time my third sister had gotten to the point where she was ready to want one, my mother had worked the whole business into a comedy routine. ‘Why not use a Band-Aid instead?’ she would say.”

This plays almost like a sitcom or a scene from one of her mother’s movies. The tone also implies something deeper, namely that all you need to deal with any problem is attitude, if you can only find the right attitude. It ignores or skips over the views of those who might consider some problems too difficult, too intractable or too deep-seated to be dealt with by attitude changes alone. Not that Ephron was dying to write feminist tracts or manifestos of any kind. Manifestos were probably impossible for someone who once said,

“I love trash. I have never believed that kitsch kills.”

and

“Fashion, trashy books, show business, food. I could call these Popular Culture, but I like writing about them so much that I hate to think they have to be justified in this way—or at least I’m sorry if they do.”

A lot of people, it seems, wanted to read essays written exactly this way. Ephron’s range was not great but she did sometimes venture beyond the tendency to rely almost exclusively on the sound of her voice to convey ideas and knowledge. As her career blossomed, her writing encompassed such topics as food, aging, relationships, political celebrities, journalism, digital technology and women, along with personal profiles of people who interested her including Helen Gurley Brown, Lillian Hellman and Julie Nixon Eisenhower. She experimented with a wide range of media, including a novel inspired by her acrimonious divorce from the journalist Carl Bernstein, plays and movie scripts, leading eventually to a much wider audience when she began directing her own movies. Her reporting on the annual Pillsbury Bake-Off in 1973 was a rare example of building a vivid description from details that place readers on the scene:

“Edna Buckley, who was fresh from representing New York State at the National Chicken Cooking Contest, where her recipe for fried chicken in a batter of beer, cheese, and crushed pretzels had gone down to defeat, brought with her a lucky handkerchief, a lucky horseshoe, a lucky dime for her shoe, a potholder with the Pillsbury Poppin’ Fresh Doughboy on it, an Our Blessed Lady pin, and all of her jewelry, including a silver charm also in the shape of the doughboy.”

This was unusual for Ephron: writing in which carefully noted details accrete into a larger, more complex picture without relying on irony or her own personal opinion. Most of the time, Ephron didn’t describe things as much as describe her attitude toward them. Sometimes the heavy reliance on personal consciousness seemed to take the place of facts:

“The next man I was involved with lived in Boston. He taught me to cook mushrooms. He taught me that if you heat the butter very hot and put just a very few mushrooms into the frying pan, they come out nice and brown and crispy, whereas if the butter is only moderately hot and you crowd the mushrooms, they get all mushy and wet. Every time I make mushrooms I think of him.”

A single telling detail stands for a whole constellation of things about a relationship. It’s wry, funny and highly compressed; all that’s missing is what these two people actually did together in the kitchen. A scene, in other words. Did she slice mushrooms while he heated up the butter or did he do everything while she watched? Did she do everything, after which he did everything again his own way with more mushrooms in order to show her the difference? We aren’t told. I don’t care whether Ephron remembered her cooking lesson accurately; this was an essay after all, not journalism. I’m also perfectly aware readers can’t dictate to a writer. Still, they can wonder why she denied them a scene as full of vivid detail as this one, from “A Few Words About Breasts”:

“I am walking down Walden Drive in my jeans and my father’s shirt hanging out and my old red loafers with the socks falling into them and coming toward me is…I take a deep breath…a young woman. Dina. Her hair is curled and she had a waist and hips and a bust and she is wearing a straight skirt, an article of clothing I have been repeatedly told I will be unable to wear until I have the hips to hold it up. My jaw drops, and suddenly I am crying, crying hysterically, can’t catch my breath, sobbing. My best friend has betrayed me. She had gone ahead without me and done it. She has shaped up.”

So what, you might ask; despite the shortcomings, Ephron was neither the first nor (as we’ve seen) the last writer to build and sustain interest by adopting a lighthearted, accessible personality or using her own experience to illuminate larger issues (A few readers compared her to Erma Bombeck, which I suspect neither writer would have appreciated). But language analysis can only explain what a writer does on the page, not her motives, nor the hero-worship. That explanation has to be found in the realm of psychology. Commenters on Amazon said Ephron was “extremely funny.” “I longed to be in her world.” They called her voice “priceless,” “Like having a really good friend tell you that it’s all going to be okay—you’re not alone.” “I want to tell Nora Ephron my life story,” said another. “Like cuddling up on the sofa with a dear girlfriend.” First prize (another $25.00 savings bond) goes to the woman who took an Ephron audiobook to the DMV. “I chuckled out loud so many times while in line, I think people wanted me dead for having any sort of fun at the DMV. But at the same time, Ephron managed to make me cry. And by the time I had to take my picture, I had to fix my makeup.”

It seems unfair to subject someone who provokes responses like that to literary analysis rather than a bear hug. Which is why criticizing Ephron’s writing feels so much like unfairly piling onto the writer herself. You don’t need a critic to understand this response, you need a psychologist or a sociologist. Conveniently, those two professions already have a term for it: parasociality, the name for what happens when fans write letters to music and movie stars they worship but don’t know personally. The same process has rarely attracted attention when it happens to writers. In her essay “The Writer As Imaginary Friend,” Ashley P. Taylor asked what happens when the “I” in a piece of writing has the same name and biography as the individual who wrote it? “The better the writing, the better the reader can imagine the writer and the stronger the illusion of knowing that writer. The stronger an illusion, the less one recognizes it as such.” Taylor notes that in most literature, “the writer is there, yet inaccessible, as if behind a glass wall,” and contrasts this with “the space-collapsing closeness of letter writing… The reader may imagine that hanging out with a writer would be better than reading her work, but that’s an illusion.”

This sounds a lot closer to what Ephron was about in her writing. But is it close enough? Taylor is surely correct in noting that a writer’s voice on the page is at least partly an illusion, an invented thing, and that even writers who write nonfiction in the first person are never quite the same in their nonwriting lives as what they seem to be on the page. With some writers, you can sense this. It must be true of Ephron too, yet her readers never seemed to want to believe it. This may be the reason so many of Ephron’s readers had exactly the same feeling of closeness and affection for her as those who actually knew her personally. Friends praised her warmth, supportiveness and personal generosity, calling her “glamorous, almost royal.” “I loved her to pieces,” said Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. Pamela Newton said, “She encouraged me, supported me, and promoted me, way above and beyond the call of duty, considering that she was a famous writer and I was just someone she knew.”

Comments like this made criticizing the writing feel like criticizing the writer, which may explain the peculiarly ungenerous quality of the smaller number of readers—they were always there in the Amazon comments as well as in signed pieces—who didn’t like Ephron’s writing at all, calling her “annoying,” “offensive,” a writer of “glibness but little substance,” “a rich person complaining about her richness,” “unaware of how fortunate she was to have such trivial problems.” More analytically, Matt Weinstock said, “Her writing had a gambler’s unevenness. The rambling digressiveness, along with the faint datedness, of her worldview only intensified your shock when Ephron arrived, seemingly by accident, at an incisive thought.”

Is that overly cruel or is it beside the point—exactly as beside the point as the purely literary analysis? For all the limits Ephron’s non-fans found in her books (the over-personalization, the tendency to go for easy observations, the nattering tone), the writing compels attention. It has a kind of glow about it closely related to the charisma some people radiate in real life. Is it just a coincidence that Ephron was called one of those rare individuals who were more charismatic than their fictional portrayals? “Fully there in every moment,” as Frank Rich said. This alone helps explain why so many of her fans didn’t care to distinguish between the writer and the writing. It surely explains why they kept them coming back for more.

By the time Ephron’s final illness was upon her, she had been writing in more or less the same voice for so long that her admirers might have thought she’d never aged. There was a youthfulness about her writing, beyond just the sauciness, that has to do with the fact that it never evolved, never “matured” into something sober and responsible. It would be tempting to say she knew her limits (remember almost no one called her a great writer) if the full scope of her work didn’t demonstrate how much more she could do when she wanted to.

Given the feeling of over-revelation that characterizes so much of Ephron’s best known work, it’s not surprising that, after her death, many of her admirers wondered why she chose to keep her final illness a closely guarded secret for years. Perhaps she couldn’t figure out how to make death funny and couldn’t imagine another kind of emotional register in which to speak of the moments when, as her son put it, she was “lying in her bed hallucinating, in that dream space people go on their way to being gone,” with her longtime housekeeper sobbing in the corner of the room. Perhaps, to be more generous about it, she was no longer in any position to deal with the cruelty of her impending death in any form, literary or not. “For her, tragedy was a pit of clichés,” her son said, writing with restrained feeling on the topic of her final days. “The thing is, you can’t really turn a fatal illness into a joke.”

A pit of clichés? Really? This is hard to understand in someone who wrote about her own mother’s death this way:

“The months went by, and she hung on. In the hospital, and then out, then back in. She was drugged, and wretchedly thin, and her throat was so dry, or so clogged with mucus, that I could not understand anything she tried to say to me. If I nodded at her as if I understood, she would become furious because she knew I hadn’t; if I said, ‘What?’ or ‘I don’t understand,’ she would become furious at the effort it would take to say it again. And I was furious, too, because I was there for some kind of answer—what kind of answer? What was the question? I don’t know, but I wanted one, a big one, and there was no chance of getting it. The Thorazine kept her quiet and groggy and hallucinating. When the nurse would bring in lunch, soft food, no salt allowed, she would look around almost brightly and say, ‘I think I’ll take it in the living room.’

Is it unfair to wonder what could lead anyone to see tragedy as a cliché? Wow, that’s an uncharitable thought for me to have, isn’t it? One doesn’t want to pile onto someone suffering from a terminal illness by accusing her of failing to find adequate terms to speak publicly about it. A writer’s death should be occasion for celebration, not fault finding—or is this the same old tendency for criticism of Ephron’s writing to feel like criticism of the writer? “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Ephron had a right to her silence, leaving behind only the imaginary friendship for which so many readers loved her. Or loved “her.” And perhaps that’s enough. Though the author is gone, her writing still lives on the page for her fans—the one who wanted to know why she had to go and die, the one who felt smarter, funnier, older and more sophisticated, the woman waiting on line in the DMV. Any time they want, these readers can open one of her essays, watch her come to life again and be her imaginary friend forever.