Big City Book Club: Discussing Nora Ephron

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

We will have a live discussion about Nora Ephron's early nonfiction from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. tonight, right here on City Room in the comments section below. This post kicks off that conversation, so start submitting your comments and questions now. See you tonight! - Ginia Bellafante

After Nora Ephron died in June, we announced that this book club would be reading her collection “Wallflower at the Orgy.” Ever since, it has seemed more and more of the moment. Part of the delight of reading Ms. Ephron is always the sense that she is speaking to you from an uninterrupted present. And the other part, of course, is that she'd never use a phrase like “uninterrupted present” because pretension was so clearly anathema to her.

But, as it happens, recent events have given the book a heightened currency. Helen Gurley Brown, who died last week at 90, is profiled in this compilation of Ms. Ephron's journalistic work from t he late 1960s. So too is the phenomenon of Ayn Rand, whose aura has been summoned anew as the vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan's philosophical It girl. Both of Ms. Ephron's essays are devastating, but neither attack has a trace of vitriol, or rage, or existential lament for a world that had lost its moral bearings. In fact, there is really nothing of lament at all, the quality that so distinguished Joan Didion's work of the same period (and really, always).

(Ms. Ephron and Ms. Didion were arguably the two most acclaimed female journalists of the late midcentury, their sensibilities perfectly opposed. One wonders what they made of each other at the parties, in New York and Los Angeles, where they inevitably came into contact, Ms. Didion's neurasthenia up against Ms. Ephron's strudel-loving bonhomie.)

At any rate, Ms. Ephron doesn't use Ms. Brown or Rand as the basis for an argument about a nation going to dust; instead she finds in both women the same malady of an adolescent worldview. Both are portrayed as overgrown girls. Ms. Brown is a waif with “tiny wrists, tiny voice,” always breaking into tears and coming to odds with corporate grown-ups. Rand is, essentially, a romance novelist whose devotion to egoism could really appeal only to the 15-year-old female mind. The message is implicit: if you don't happen to be in ninth grade and you still like this drivel, there is a problem.

Ms. Ephron grew up in California, but she became the consummate New Yorker. Her movies (“When Harry Met Sally,” “You've Got Mail”) romanticized the city as fervently as Woody Allen's did. She approached New York similarly in her journalistic work, turning away from the ugliness of the '60s, the crime and financial upheaval and mayhem. Instead, she skewered the institutions in which she clearly took enormous pleasure: the universe of food snobs, the world of Women's Wear Daily. And she reveres those worth y of reverence - like the director Mike Nichols - without ever getting too worshipful or cloying, without ever succumbing to the horrors of the modern puff piece.

I should say here that I went especially loopy over the essay “Beach Wives,” Ms. Ephron's account of Manhattan housewives summering in East Hampton. It's August, and in my own neighborhood the nonworking mothers have fled and late at night I find myself getting bitter. Ms. Ephron was too kind, or too wise or too conflict-averse to engage in the mommy wars - or any kind of wars. But she clearly got what was so maddening about the “1% Wives” recently pilloried in a piece in The Atlantic by my acquaintance Elizabeth Wurtzel.

Ms. Eprhon had a lot more to say about women in “Crazy Salad,” her other essay collection from this period, also fair game for this conversation. And if you haven't finished (or started!) the books, don't worry, we can range across her whole career.

Is this early Nora Ephron the same writer you knew from her more recent work? Weigh in in the comments section below.