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Nora Ephron on Her New Book and Why She's No Longer Excited to Hear 'You've Got Mail'

by Nicki Gostin (Subscribe to Nicki Gostin's posts)
Nov 10th 2010 12:43PM

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Filed under: Celeb Parents, Books for Parents, Celeb News & Interviews

nora ephron book

Nora Ephron's new book is a collection of essays. Credit: Charles Sykes, AP

She's written top-selling books like "I Feel Bad About My Neck." She's a three-time Oscar nominee for for Best Original Screenplay for movies like "When Harry Met Sally. Oh, and she wrote the screenplay for "You've Got Mail" and directed "Sleepless in Seattle," too.

Now, Nora Ephron has published "I Remember Nothing," a new collection of essays. Smart, witty, hilarious and sharply incisive, the author explores topics including aging, divorce, email and her alcoholic mother.

Ephron, 69, lives in New York City with her husband, writer Nick Pileggi, and is the mother of Max, 30, who Ephron proudly tells us is a guitarist for "have you heard of Kesha?" and Jacob, 32, a journalist who writes for The Daily Beast.

ParentDish recently caught up with Ephron to chat about the new essays, the food she's been cooking up in the kitchen and what's on her bucket list.

ParentDish: The essay that broke my heart was about your mother. When did she become an alcoholic?
Nora Ephron: Delia (one of Ephron's three sisters) and I always discuss this. Delia always says every child has different parents, and she would probably date this differently then me, but I would say when I was about 14 or 15. And, as a result, by the way, I'm the sister with way more of the good memories than each subsequent sister who had less and less. The truth is, I got out and went to college, leaving my sisters with much more dealing with it than I had to do. It was sad, it was very sad.

PD: There is a lot about aging in this collection of essays. When did you become preoccupied with aging?
NE: I say to many of my friends who are turning 60 and going, "Oh, my God, I'm turning 60, this is a catastrophe!" -- what I say to them is, "No, no, no, no, you have until 65 and then, and then things get serious. You can go from 60 to 65 without too much worry and then suddenly the conversation changes. I noticed there are two conversations going on now. One is the conversation that everyone is having, which is about their mobile devices, whatever they are, and the amount of conversation about Apple is phenomenal. You can't get through an evening without people asking you about what type of iPhone you have and whether you use Kindle. The other conversation for my age is who's died, who's sick, who was misdiagnosed, what hospital they were at when the misdiagnosis took place.

PD: Why do you hate e-mail?
NE: You're always buried under it. One of the things I can't get over is that when they first started e-mail, I fell so deeply in love with it. My feelings about e-mail are on the level of being a spurned lover because I feel that it turned against me. I started very early on e-mail. I remember it was during the O.J. Simpson trial, so whenever that was, and I had only six or seven friends on e-mail and they were good friends, and when you heard that magic little voice saying, "You've got mail!" your heart just skipped a beat.

Now, I mean, today I got an e-mail from James Carville. "Dear Nora." For one second I thought it was actually from James Carville but it was the Democratic National Committee. I'm a Democrat and I get about 10 e-mails a week from them. And how often do you get a really great e-mail now? It's usually about one a week.

PD: Do you constantly check your e-mail?
NE: I now have something on my computer called Freedom. It's sort of like a parental control and you press it and it asks you how many minutes you'd like to be forbidden from going on the Internet. It's really great.

PD: How long have you lasted?
NE: 120 minutes.

PD: Were you jonesing at the end?
NE: A little bit. Yes, I was.

PD: What are you cooking right now?
NE: I have fallen in love with a recipe in the new Barefoot Contessa cookbook.

PD: Homemade ricotta?
NE: Yes!

PD: I made it last week.
NE: So, you see it's an epidemic? I've made it six times in the last month. It's unbelievable. So you understand and I don't have to send you the recipe. I felt like someone in a little milk maid's outfit after I made it. I was so beside myself with my crafty skills.

PD: You have a very honest essay about divorce and its effect on kids.
NE: Obviously, if there's abuse going on then ... but if it's just one of those marriages where ... I mean, there are a lot of people who get divorced and several years later they think, "Hmm, was I really that bored?" By the way, I don't mean that people shouldn't have more fun in life and be with people who really make them happy. I just mean don't kid yourself that your kids are OK. The kids are really not alright. It doesn't mean they don't survive; it's just, don't kid yourself that kids like leaving one house to go to another. It's not what they're built for and, by the way, the idea that people who are rich enough who have the thing where the kids stay in one place and the parents move in and out, it's all just trying to make lemonade. It's tough for kids; it just is.

But it did really interest me to see how much it defined me. People know you as married or divorced, but if you're divorced and remarried, what are you? Are you more divorced than married? Are you more married than divorced? You're some weird combination, like a Minotaur.

PD: The best divorce is when you don't have kids. You never have to see the person again.
NE: Yes. It's a weird thing that you can spend such a long time with someone and have so little in your head about it. One of the clearest images of my first marriage is that I made a huge amount of Rice-A-Roni that we used to eat on a checked vinyl tablecloth on the bed and watch TV. I would say that's one of my main memories of that marriage and it was six years long! By the way, Rice-A-Roni is pretty good. I've never made it since.

PD: Do you have a bucket list?
NE: I have a list of things I want to do next year. I definitely want to get better at phone apps. Right now I keep forgetting the ones I have. I'm definitely going to figure out how Netflix works on my iPad and I'm going to Istanbul. I'm dying to go. For years I hadn't gone to Barcelona, it became a kind of a joke in the house, and oh, my God isn't it a great city?

Tags: I remember Nothing, IRememberNothing, nora ephron, NoraEphron

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