Edel Coffey

Yes, she has become this kind of cultural touchstone, particularly for millennial women.

I don't know how or why it happened, but she seemed to sort of explode in popularity, particularly after her death.

And maybe it's to do with the fact that her films, you know, the streaming phenomenon,

Her films are widely accessible on all the streamers now and before you would have had to rent them or catch them on TV whenever they're on.

Also social media, she was responsible for so many pithy one-liner and quips that they're very adaptable to social media.

You can clip them and post them and she was very clever, she was very quick, she was very bright.

And obviously that is very attractive, particularly if you want to post it on social media and look clever and quick and bright too.

But also she wrote about female experience.

She became famous for her personal essays as well as those truly wonderful romantic comedies that you mentioned there.

She was a journalist first and she wrote these personal essays in the 60s and 70s at a time where it wasn't really that common for women to write about themselves in this honest,

satirical, sort of self-deprecating way that, you know, has become so well known to us now.

People like Lena Dunham would describe her as an absolute influence and that they couldn't have written the work they write without her.

Dolly Alderton, those kind of writers really relate to her.

That line is attributed to her, but it was her mother who said that and she used to say it to her and she was the eldest of three, the eldest of four girls.

And her mother used to say to them when they had a bad experience where they were crying about something, you know, everything's copy.

It was kind of like just, you know, shut up complaining and turn it into...

some glittering piece of copy and you'll be happy.

And she did that in her own life.

So her parents were these Hollywood screenwriters.

And she was born in New York, but when she was four, the family moved to LA where they wrote films.