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Chapter 1: Who was Nora Ephron and what made her a cultural icon?
To something else, author Adele Coffey, hello to you in our Galway studio. Hi, Brendan. How are you? Good. So we're going to go very analogue now, Adele. You're with us today in your capacity as a fan of Nora Ephron. Nora Ephron died actually, believe it or not, 14 years ago next week. But she was a journalist. She was a playwright. She was a filmmaker. She was an essayist. She was a novelist.
probably best remembered in the general public imagination for writing When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle and films like that. But Adele, she's kind of more than that. Is she almost a mentor figure to generations of women?
Yeah.
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.
Yeah, she kind of invented that whole thing, really, didn't she? It was her parents, wasn't it? The famous thing of everything is copy. It was her parents taught her that, wasn't it?
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Chapter 2: How did Nora Ephron influence modern female writers?
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. And so she, you know, she had this kind of access to Hollywood and her parents would have known really famous people. But she always sort of described herself as an outsider.
And as soon as she could leave L.A., she went back to New York. So she always had that yearning for New York. And we see that in her films as well. So back she went to New York where she worked as a journalist in Newsweek and she worked as a male girl there. As you would expect at the time, women weren't, you know, number one in the journalism world.
But she worked her way up as she actually got a job in the New York Post, having written a parody of a New York Post journalist in Newsweek. So they were like, well, if she can parody us this well, let's hire her. So off she went. And it was after that that she got married to the Watergate journalist, Carl Bernstein, and he became the subject of a romantic play, which is Harp.
Burn, which is experiencing such a renaissance at the moment. Loads of people talking about it online. I think it's because Natalie Portman made it her book club choice. So a lot of people are just rediscovering her.
And why is Heartburn so great? Because I know that's the one book you're saying people should read if they want to read a Nora Epstein book.
Oh, 100%. And a lot of people aren't even aware that Heartburn wasn't a novel first because she turned it into a film starring Meryl Streep in 1986. The book came out in 1983. But it's so brilliant because she makes heartbreak hilarious. And let me just tell you how awful this heartbreak was. She was married to Bernstein, who was one of the most famous journalists in the world at the time.
She had a son with him and she was expecting their second son. She was seven months pregnant. She discovered he's having an affair and the marriage breaks up. And somehow she managed to turn this into the most perfect, biting comedy where she writes so wickedly about the woman he's having the affair with. She writes wickedly about him. And she makes herself... She maintains this kind of...
self-deprecating awareness of ourself. But it's just, it's so wonderful. It's a book that I give to everyone because you can read it at any stage of your life. You can read it when you're in the depths of depression. You can read it when you're happy and content. You can always find something in it. It's the perfect book to give, I think.
She kind of also then, on the lighter note, with You've Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, all that, she kind of invented the modern messy rom-com as we know it. I think men and women and how they relate to each other and how they talk about each other is one of her big themes, isn't it?
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Chapter 3: What themes did Nora Ephron explore in her personal essays?
No wonder the millennials are flocking to it, OK? And I know you want to recommend, if people want to read one essay or piece of journalism, we're recommending a piece called Moving On as well. But look, the films Harry Met Sally Sleepless, When Harry Met Sally Sleeped in Seattle, You've Got Mail, Julie and Julia are all there for kids to rediscover. Adele Coffey, thank you very much.
And we'll mention, Adele, that your own current novel is called In Glass Houses.
Yeah, not a wrong come, unfortunately. Lots of death and murder and page turning.
Yeah, your usual darkness. Okay, Adele Coffey, thanks very much. We'll take a break.