New York breeds the most unexpected literary monsters. Since Fran lebowitz but also Woody Allen and reaching the now missing Nora Ephron. On these and some other narrators, the great city exerts a kind of centripetal force. A magnetism that places them in the very center of the hurricane, where the raving cyclone of life can be seen.
This is how his works finally are, strangely slow as dead calm in the maelstrom of the Big Apple. Because someone has to be in charge of outlining the flashes of life between the frenzy and the feeling of alienation that can run through the streets at the merciless rhythm of its passers-by.
In his most screenplay creative side, Ephron overturned a romantic imaginary also loaded with its edges, tuning into the tragicomic with the aforementioned Allen. But in the strictly literary field, Ephron forgot about the corseting due to the scenes to take to the cinema, to waste much more with his New York always in the background...
Top 3 Recommended Nora Ephron Books
I do not remember anything
From waking up on a hungover Sunday to a murderer's confession. A very recurring argument that of not remembering anything to delve into the fast and fierce evolution of life in the face of idealisms, ideologies, feminist perceptions of the world and endless arguments that season this very personal work.
Nora Ephron is a literary genre unto herself. Famous for her acerbic wit, her apt and comical analyzes of the female experience, and her ability to detect the absurdities of modern life, she is one of the most unique and influential New York writers and screenwriters of recent decades. .
In this book, the last he published, Ephron makes an amusing review of his past, of his greatest failures and joys, and humorously laments the daily vicissitudes. He tells us –among other things– about what we remember, forget or invent when we reach a certain age; of his love affair with journalism; how to survive a divorce; of his troubling relationship with his email inbox; of intimacies, little manias, favorite recipes, disastrous parties; and of many questions that all women ask themselves when they reach a certain age but that they rarely dare to confess.
The author synthesizes the best of her literature – sincerity, humor and dazzling simplicity – in I don't remember anything, without a doubt one of her best works.
The cake is over
Here is the only novel by Nora Ephron, one of New York's sharpest and most brilliant journalists: a very funny, sometimes bittersweet book, written with a humor that has been compared to that of Woody Allen, Philip Roth and Erica Jong. It is about the shipwreck of an apparently happy marriage, and at the same time it is a colorful chronicle of customs of a certain intelligentsia that lived through the fast-paced sixties and the Vietnam War and is now in its second or third marriage – a tribe that the narrator belongs, knows, loves and ridicules.
No Cake was a resounding bestseller in the United States, where it was considered a roman à clef about Ephron's relationship with Carl Bernstein, the famous reporter who investigated the Watergate case.
The narrator, Rachel Samstat, a Jewish New Yorker, the daughter of a supporting actor and an acting agent (who specialized in midgets and scarred faces), is a cookbook writer with more wit than recipes, living in Washington. and is married to Mark, a famed political journalist. She is happy, she has a son and she is seven months pregnant when she discovers that her husband is in love with Thelma, the wife of a diplomat. Apparently everyone, including Thelma's husband, knew what was going on behind Rachel's back.
With this work, originally published in 1983 and adapted for the screen in 1986, Ephron showed that his shrewd and caustic talent also shone in the service of literature. She was a pioneer and teacher of later generations, she encouraged them from various disciplines not to let themselves be defeated by the rigidity of social conventions or by unscrupulous men: despite adversity, life goes on.
crazy salad
In Crazy Salad, New Yorker Nora Ephron demonstrates her steely sense of humor and fearsome powers of observation. The theme of the book basically revolves around women, feminism and the conflicts of everyday life in the United States.
Among the various topics he addresses: the autobiographical, in the hilarious story "Some observations on breasts"; women's sexual fantasies; the “vaginal politics” (“We have passed the time when happiness was a cuddly puppy and the time when happiness was a dry martini and we have arrived at the time when happiness is “knowing what your womb looks like””) ; the defeat of Betty Friedan, "the-mother-of-all-of-us", against Gloria Steinem, the representative of the new generation; the use of the feminist movement by political parties; the beauty queens; awareness groups; the ineffable star of the porn film Deep Throat, Linda Lovelace; a tremendous national cooking contest, which is a vitriol portrait of the housewife of the silent majority; the persistence of sexist behavior among presumably progressive men; the manipulation of women by the cosmetic industry; etc etc.
