illustration woman dining

Three Rules for Middle-Age Happiness

Gather friends and feed them, laugh in the face of calamity, and cut out all the things––people, jobs, body parts––that no longer serve you.

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“The only thing a uterus is good for after a certain point is causing pain and killing you. Why are we even talking about this?” Nora jams a fork into her chopped chicken salad, the one she insisted I order as well. “If your doctor says it needs to come out, yank it out.” Nora speaks her mind the way others breathe: an involuntary reflex, not a choice. (Obviously, all dialogue here, including my own, is recorded from the distortion field of memory.)

“But the uterus …” I say, spearing a slice of egg. “It’s so …”

“Symbolic?”

“Yes. Don’t roll your eyes.”

“I’m not rolling my eyes.” She leans in. “I’m trying to get you to face a, well, it’s not even a hard truth. It’s an easy one. Promise me the minute you leave this lunch you’ll pick up the phone and schedule the hysterectomy today. Not tomorrow. Today .”

“Why the rush?”

“Why the hesitation?” Nora has leukemia. She knows this. I do not.

"Ladyparts" book cover

Ten years earlier, Nora had cold-called my home, annoyed that she’d had to get my number through a friend. Throughout her life, if you dialed 411 and asked for her home number, you’d get it. “Why would you ever not be listed?” she’d said. “What if someone needs to get in touch with you?” But first she said, “Hi, Deb, this is Nora Ephron. I loved your memoir, and I’d like to take you out to lunch.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “And I’m Joan of Arc.” I assumed it was a friend, mimicking her voice. Nora was my superhero. Screenwriter, director, novelist, humorist, essayist, journalist—Nora did all the things I wanted to do but better, faster, stronger. I saw Heartburn three times when it first came out; When Harry Met Sally , too many times to count.

“No, Deb. This is Nora. And I’d like to invite you to lunch.”

I froze. It was her. Nora effing Ephron. On the other end of my phone. So what does one say to the woman whose work you’ve admired your entire life? For starters, not this: “Ummmm …”

“Are you still there?” said Nora.

A long, uncomfortable pause. “Sorry. Lunch. Yes!”

I’d been clutching a roll of bubble wrap when she called, staring at a wall of family photos that needed to come down. Our dark 1.5-bedroom was located over a parking garage that overheated every summer, rendering the kitchen tiles too hot for bare feet. Its windows framed the last stop of the M79 bus route. Buses idled there 24/7, blasting a toxic cloud of metaphor into the master bedroom.

Moving boxes were everywhere. My husband and I were eight years into our marriage, six years into parenthood, and five days away from seeing whether more light, air, and space could keep our marriage from collapsing. Our new living room, bright and fume-free, had an oblique view of the Twin Towers. Until it didn’t.

Now, a decade later, Nora’s my go-to person on every topic: Couches, she tells me, should be white; tables, round; emails, short; lunches, long. “You don’t need it anymore,” she says, still harping on about my uterus. “It served you well, but that part of your life is over.”

She’s right. I’m 45, I have three children––two teenagers and a preschooler––and I’m not planning on having any more. And yet: Who am I without my uterus?

“How great is this chicken salad?” says Nora.

“Delicious.”

Our lunches have become a monthly fixture, to which Nora often arrives bearing gifts with careful instructions for their use: Dr. Hauschka’s lemon oil (“Dump at least half a bottle in the bath water. Don’t skimp. If you like it, I’ll get you more”); a black cardigan from Zara (“I bought five of them, they were so cheap. You can wear it on your book tour. Look, the buttons look just like a Chanel”); a silver picture frame (“Black-and-white photos only. Color won’t work”).

“Won’t I feel like less of a woman without a uterus?” I ask.

“Oh, please.” Nora rolls her eyes again. “Would you rather not have a uterus or be dead? They go in with robots now. You’ll barely have a scar.  So what is this adeno … How do you pronounce the thing you have?”

“Adenomyosis,” I say, Googling it on my phone to make sure I get the definition right: A chronic condition in which the lining of the uterus breaks through the muscle wall, causing extensive bleeding, increased risk of anemia, heavy cramping, and severe bloating.

“Sounds delightful. I see now why you’d want to keep it.”

I laugh. Then I sigh. I’ve been putting up with this disease for 16 years because, like most women who get adenomyosis (or endometriosis, its equally wily cousin), I had no idea I had it. “How are your periods?” my gynecologist would ask every year, and every year I would answer, “Heavy,” but with a tone that implied I had everything under control. Why didn’t I tell my doctor I had viselike cramps and slept on a doggy wee-wee pad half the month to catch the overflow?

Every woman in a paper robe, facing her doctor, knows she is silently being judged. “Come on! It can’t be that bad,” a doctor once told me, diagnosing a mild case of gas three hours before I had an emergency appendectomy.

I’d had painful and heavy periods since adolescence, but they grew exponentially worse after the birth of my first child, in 1995. It wasn’t until just after my annual checkup in 2011, however, that my general practitioner became alarmed. A woman is considered anemic when she has fewer than 12 grams of hemoglobin per deciliter of blood. I had seven. “This can’t be right,” my doctor said, staring at my results. “How are you even standing?”

I was sitting. “I’ve been a little tired.” ( I’m exhausted! )

“Are you able to work and take care of the kids?”

“I do my best.” ( Who else is going to do it? )

“Look,” said my doctor. “We can either hospitalize you every month for anemia or you can go ahead and get a hysterectomy. It’s your choice, but not really? I don’t think getting transfusions every month is a sustainable life choice.”

“Whatever it’s called,” says Nora, “I want you to promise me you’ll get that hysterectomy this year.” Also, she doesn’t like the paperback cover design for my new novel, a picture of a woman lying on a park bench with a book in her hand. “She looks dead. Like the book was so boring, it killed her. ”

“I can’t do this anymore,” I finally admit to Nora. I call her early, too distraught to elaborate, after a particularly disturbing interaction with my husband the previous night.

She’s at her house in East Hampton and reserves me a ticket on the jitney while we are still on the phone. “I’ll meet you at the bus stop. Don’t eat. I’m making lunch.” Five years earlier, when I’d called to say I couldn’t attend the baby shower she was throwing for me, because my prematurely contracting uterus and I were now on bed rest, she showed up at my apartment with a dozen lobsters, two homemade lemon-meringue pies, our mutual friends, and her sleeves rolled up to do the dishes when the party was over.

I’ve told no one but my shrink about the darker corners of my marriage, but when Nora picks me up, I unearth all of it. Every last bone. A few years earlier, my husband was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and although the diagnosis helped us understand both his lack of empathy and my anger over its absence, it’s one thing to comprehend the origins of our marital dysfunction and quite another to fix it. I still feel alone, unseen, and frequently gaslit; he still feels confused and hurt by my seething fury.

After the exorcism, Nora’s husband, Nick, joins us for lunch, placing his hands gently on his wife’s shoulders before kissing the top of her head. “Is this for real?” I say dubiously, air-circling their conjoined heads with my finger: Harry and Sally, in their golden years. “Is this as good as it seems?” My jealousy burns almost as brightly as my admiration.

“No,” says Nick. “It’s better.”

“Deb!” Nora laughs, standing up and walking to the kitchen counter. “He’s my third husband. If you can’t get it right by your third marriage, well … Come. Help me carry the salad to the table.” She slices thick slabs of peasant bread. “Are you staying over tonight?”

“I can’t,” I say. “I have to pick up my son at 5:30.”

Nora purses her lips. “Might his father be able to do that?”

“I’ll ask,” I say, knowing before dialing his number that the answer will be no.

“You know I’m here for you if you decide to pull the plug,” she tells me, “but please: Try to fix the marriage before taking any drastic measures. Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.” She scribbles the name and number of her friend Joyce, a Jungian therapist who treats couples at an impasse, on a scrap of paper. “Joyce is a genius,” she says. “Call her.”

Illustration of two uterus holding hands

December 2011

“You’re not eating,” says Nora.

“I had a big breakfast.” Stress has eaten my appetite. Anemia has eaten my red blood cells.

“No. Sorry. You are not allowed to add anorexia onto adeno … whatever it’s called. Did you schedule that surgery yet?”

“I can’t have a major operation right now. I’ll do it after my novel comes out.”

“What exactly are you worried about when you imagine going under the knife?” she asks.

“I’m not worried about going under the knife,” I say, moving the pieces of cucumber and chicken around on my plate like pawns on a chessboard. “I’m worried about the aftermath.” The day after my appendectomy, my husband had asked me to bring him a Sudafed for his runny nose, because my side of the bed was closer to the bathroom. I fiddle with my wedding band: a new tic.

Nora notices. She notices everything. “How are things going with Joyce?”

“Joyce is great.”

“And the marriage?

I sigh. Not wanting to disappoint her, but unable to find hopeful words. “About as healthy as my uterus.”

She pauses, weighing her words. “He doesn’t have Asperger’s, you know. I’m sure of it.”

“What? No, stop.” This is the only argument we will ever have in our 11-year friendship, the only time her well-earned confidence about always being right gets in the way of the truth.

“But he’s so at ease at our dinner parties,” she says. “And he truly seems to love you. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s a ruse, his ease,” I say. “It’s a survival skill. He knows how to watch and listen carefully and learn behaviors. He watched rom-coms, for example, to figure out how to woo me.”

“Seriously?” says Nora, rom-com auteur.

“More or less,” I say.

“Okay, fine. I’ll stop.” She gives me the dreaded Nora Stare™: a raised-eyebrow, chin-down, crooked-mouth rebuke. “But that doesn’t mean I think you’re right.”

I laugh. “I wouldn’t want you any other way.” I look across the table at this daughterless woman who has all but adopted me and several other women. Who never judges my actions but tries to understand. Who champions my work, even when it’s not going well, and loves my children as if they were her own. Who teaches me, by example, how to navigate the postreproductive half of my life: Gather friends in your home and feed them, laugh in the face of calamity, cut out all the things––people, jobs, body parts––that no longer serve you.

After lunch, she flags down a taxi. “Are you feeling okay?” I ask. She lives three blocks away. She always walks home.

“I’m fine,” she says. She shuts the door and rolls down the window. “Schedule that surgery already, please! And be nice to your husband. One more shot, okay? For my sake.”

“Okay, okay!” I watch the blur of yellow that is Nora disappear up Madison Avenue and set a date for my hysterectomy.

“I’m dying to see you,” I write Nora, the morning after my surgery, at the precise moment when she, unbeknownst to me, is the one doing the hard work of dying. “Wanted to see what your summer looks like so we can plan something in, I dunno, late July?”

Unusually, she does not write back. Or even call. I’m unnerved. She always responds to my emails within an hour or two, max.

The hysterectomy—which, just as Nora had predicted, was done with robot arms—had lasted a little more than eight hours. I’d woken up in recovery to the sounds of the nurses whispering: “Where’s the husband? Has anyone seen the husband? We can’t reach him. Is there another number?”

“What?” I said, suddenly cogent and in pain.

“We can’t find your husband,” said the unfamiliar faces now hovering over my head. “Is there anyone else we can call at this time?”

“Yes. Call Nora, please.”

“Who’s Nora?” said the nurse.

“Nora Ephron. She’s listed. Call 411. That’s E-p-h-r- …”

“She’s delirious,” the nurses whispered.

Back home, less than 24 hours after surgery, I beg my husband for a lunch that never comes, for quiet that never falls, for help with our older son, who’s stuck downstairs in a taxi without cash to pay the fare. “I’m watching a movie,” he yells from the TV room. “Can you do it?”

I end up screaming at him with so much force, a hernia pops out of one of my incisions. “That’s it. I want a divorce,” I say. Nora will understand. She has to. I’ll call her first thing tomorrow to tell her.

Instead, I’m awoken by a series of texts from a friend, asking if I’ve heard the news: Nora is gravely ill. What? I call Nora’s cellphone. She doesn’t pick up. I write her another email. She doesn’t respond. Her death is announced the next day. Her face is all over the TV, her voice all over the radio; I have to turn off both to keep from weeping.

Her husband invites her friends to their apartment to eat the chicken-salad sandwiches Nora herself picked out for the occasion. “Why didn’t she tell us?” we all ask one another.

She’d told almost no one about her cancer, including her sons, until the end. Which was odd, as she was the self-proclaimed Queen of Indiscretion. Years before it was public knowledge, she told me and anyone else who would listen that Deep Throat was the FBI agent Mark Felt. At a dinner party, when a friend asked Nora if she was working on a new movie, she said yes but she wasn’t allowed to talk about it. Then she proceeded to spill every last detail about Julie & Julia , including the fact that she’d just spoken to Meryl Streep about coming on as its lead. How could she have kept her own terminal illness a secret?

Back home, my teenage daughter stops me as I head into the bathroom. “Mom,” she says, “I need to tell you something really personal, but I’ve been worried about telling you while you’re recovering. I didn’t want to bother you. The coincidence is just too … weird.”

“Hit me,” I say.

“Okay, so, while you were in the hospital? Like, literally during the exact hours when they were removing your uterus?”

“I got my period.”

“What?!!! No!!! That’s so crazy! Congratulations!” I hug her. I kiss her. The torch has been passed. Life goes on. What comes out of me can only be described as craughing: that combination of crying and laughter. “Do you have everything you need? I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for that. Do you even know how to use a—”

“Mom! Oh my God, stop. Yes. I’m the last one of my friends to get it. They taught me everything.”

“Okay, okay, but promise me one thing,” I say, channeling Nora.

“Sure,” she says, “what?”

“Promise me you’ll never be afraid to talk to me about anything.”

“Oh my God, Mom. Chill. It’s just my period.”

“No, no!” I laugh. “I’m not talking about periods. I mean, like … anything.”

“Duh, of course,” she says, and suddenly it strikes me: Of course Nora told no one about her illness. The transmission of woes is a one-way street, from child to mother. A good mother doesn’t burden her children with her pain. She waits until it becomes so heavy, it either breaks her or kills her, whichever comes first.

This article was adapted from Deborah Copaken’s book Ladyparts: A Memoir .

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic .

nora ephron essay

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

My Mother’s Mink Coat

Nora Ephron never wanted a mink coat until her mother died. Then she wanted her mother’s coat. So did her sister. A Love Story.

portrait of jackie kennedy with sister lee radziwill

I think it was about 1954 when my mother got her mink. A Beverly Hills furrier had run into some difficulty with the Internal Revenue Service and he was selling off his coats. My mother would never have bought anything wholesale—she disapproved of it on grounds that I never understood but later came to suspect had something to do with being the daughter of a garment salesman—but there was a distinction between buying wholesale and getting a good price. She got a good price. It was an enormous mink. A tent. It came to her ankles, and at least two people could have fitted under it. The skins were worked vertically. I did not know this at the time. I did not know much of anything at the time, much less anything about the way mink skins were worked. A few years later, when I knew, all the furriers in America decided to work the skins horizontally; when I heard about it, I instantly understood that it would not make her happy to be wearing an Old Mink. But she always pretended that things like that meant nothing to her. She was a career woman who was defiant about not being like the other mothers, the other mothers who played canasta all day and went to P.T.A. meetings and wore perfume and talked of hemlines; she hated to shop, hated buying clothes. Once a year, after my father had nagged her into it, she would go off to a fashionable ladies’ clothing store on Wilshire Boulevard and submit to having a year’s supply of clothing brought to her in a dressing room larger than my current apartment. She grumbled throughout. I thought she was mad. Now I understand.

My guess is that my father paid for the mink, wrote the check for it—but he did not buy it for her. My parents worked together, wrote together, and there was no separation between his money and hers. That was important. Beverly Hills was a place where the other mothers wore minks their husbands had bought them. They would come to dinner. The maid would bring the coats upstairs and lay them on my mother’s bed. Dozens of them, silver, brown, black, all of them lined with what seemed like satin and monogrammed by hand with initials, three initials. I would creep into the bedroom and lie on the bed and roll over them and smell the odd and indescribable smell of the fur. Other children grow up loving the smell of fresh-cut grass and raked leaves; I grew up in Beverly Hills loving the smell of mink, the smell of the pavement after it rained, and the smell of dollar bills. A few years ago, I went back to Beverly Hills and all I could smell was jasmine, and I realized that that smell had always been there and I had never known it.

.css-f6drgc:before{margin:-0.99rem auto 0 -1.33rem;left:50%;width:2.1875rem;border:0.3125rem solid #FF3A30;height:2.1875rem;content:'';display:block;position:absolute;border-radius:100%;} .css-1aglugu{font-family:Lausanne,Lausanne-fallback,Lausanne-roboto,Lausanne-local,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:1.625rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1aglugu{font-size:1.75rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1aglugu{font-size:2.375rem;line-height:1.2;}}.css-1aglugu b,.css-1aglugu strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-1aglugu em,.css-1aglugu i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;}.css-1aglugu:before{content:'"';display:block;padding:0.3125rem 0.875rem 0 0;font-size:3.5rem;line-height:0.8;font-style:italic;font-family:Lausanne,Lausanne-fallback,Lausanne-styleitalic-roboto,Lausanne-styleitalic-local,Arial,sans-serif;} I will never have a mink. I know that now. And like a lot of things I will never have, I have mixed feelings about it.

My mother wore the mink for years. She wore it through the horizontal period and into another vertical period, but it never became fashionable again; by the time vertical skins were back, furriers were cutting minks close and fitted. Eventually, she stopped wearing it and went back to cloth coats. She and my father had moved back to New York and she had less patience than ever for shopping. And then she was sick and went to bed. One Thanksgiving she was too sick to come to the table. My mother loved Thanksgiving almost as much as she loved making a show of normal family life. I knew she was dying.

The months went by, and she hung on. In the hospital, then out, then back in. She was drugged, and wretchedly thin, and her throat was so dry, or so clogged with mucus, that I could not understand anything she tried to say to me. If I nodded at her as if I understood, she would become furious because she knew I hadn’t; if I said, “What?” or, “I don’t understand,” she would become furious at the effort it would take to say it again. And I was furious, too, because I was there for some kind of answer—what kind of answer? what was the question? I don’t know, but I wanted one, a big one, and there was no chance of getting it. The Thorazine kept her quiet and groggy and hallucinating. When the nurse would bring in lunch, soft food, no salt allowed, she would look around almost brightly and say, “I think I’ll take it in the living room.” I would become so angry at her at moments like that, so impatient. I wanted to say, damn you, there is no living room, you’re in a hospital, you’re dying, you’re going off without having explained any of it. And she would look up and open her mouth just slightly, and I would put another spoonful into it.

Then it was September. Fall. The room had a nice view of Gracie Mansion and the leaves were turning. It was a corner room on the sixth floor, which is, for those who care, a little like being seated at the right table. She did care. She managed, almost until the end, to keep up appearances. If the nurse was new, she would raise herself a bit, lift her arm in a dear and pathetic waft, and introduce us formally. “Miss Browning,” she would say, “my daughter, Mrs. Greenburg.” (My mother and the fish market were the only people who ever thought of me as Mrs. Greenburg.) Then she would collapse back onto the pillow and manage a bare flicker of a smile. I found it unbearable to be there and unbearable not to be there. I was conscious that I was going through an experience that writers write about, that I should be acutely aware of what was happening, but I hated that consciousness. And I could not look at her. She would moan with pain, and the nurse would reach under her, move her slightly, and the sheet would fall away and I would catch a glimpse of her legs, her beautiful legs now drained of muscle tone, gone to bones. The hallucinations went on. Then, one day, suddenly, she came into focus, knew exactly who I was, and like a witch, what I was thinking. “You’re a reporter,” she said to me. “Take notes.”

Two days after she died, my sisters and I spent an afternoon—how to put this?—disposing of her possessions. It was an extremely odd day. People kept dropping in, somber people, to pay their respects to my father; in the bedroom were the four of us, not at all somber, relieved, really, that it was finally over, and finding a small and genuine pleasure in the trivial problem of what to do with her things. In the midst of it, my mother’s friend Sylvia came into the room. Sylvia, who snitched on me when I told her my first dirty joke, Sylvia, who my mother always said wore her girdle to bed—Sylvia came in and saw us trying on our mother’s clothes.

“I have to talk to you,” she said to me. “Alone.”

We went into the dining room.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” she said.

“Of course,” I said.

“Don’t tell your sisters,” she said.

“What is it?” I said.

“Lamston’s has paper underpants in stock,” she said. “I bought you a pair.”

Most of my mother’s clothes were sent to charity. And the evening dresses, the beautiful chiffon Galanos dresses my father had bought her, were too big for any of us. But there was the mink. And there I was. The eldest. The most grown-up. It occurred to me I could cut it down to size or line another coat with it. Something. I took it.

I don’t really want one: a mink coat is serious, and I would have to change my life to go with it.

A few weeks later, one of my sisters called. Did I take the mink? she asked. Yes. It’s not fair, she said. She didn’t even have a winter coat and I had hundreds and a big apartment and a rich husband and now I had the mink, too. You can have half of it, I said. She didn’t want half of it. She didn’t have the money for a winter coat much less the money to turn half a mink into something. What do you want? I said. She didn’t know. There were three more phone calls, each uglier and more vituperative, thirty years of sibling rivalry come to a head over an eighteen-year-old mink. I have to make it clear that I was as awful as she was. I wanted the mink.

Finally, one day, we met in front of the Ritz Thrift Shop on Fifty-seventh Street. I was carrying the mink. She was barely speaking to me. We went inside, and a lady came over. We said we wanted to sell the mink. The lady took the fur in her hands and turned it over, peeling away the coat lining to look at the underside of the skins. She spent a good half second with it. “I won’t give you a nickel for it,” she said. The skins were worthless. Shot. Something like that. We walked out onto Fifty-seventh Street carrying the mink. It was suddenly a burden, a useless assemblage of old worn-out pelts. I didn’t want it. She didn’t want it. A year later, my maid asked for it and I gave it to her. Shortly thereafter, my maid’s apartment was robbed and the burglar got the mink.

cover

I will never have one. I know that now. And like a lot of things I will never have, I have mixed feelings about it. I mean, I could have one if I wanted one. I could squirrel away every extra nickel and buy myself, maybe not a perfect mink, but something made of mink noses or mink eyes or whatever spare parts make up that category of coats they call fun furs. But I don’t really want one: a mink coat is serious, and I would have to change my life to go with it.

But I love her for having bought one. She had the only kind of mink worth having, the kind you pay for yourself. That is not the answer I was looking for, but it will have to do.

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This Nora Ephron Essay Is A Hilarious Reminder That It's OK To Not Have Your Life Totally Together

nora ephron essay

Everyone knows her: That woman who just seems to always be so perfectly put together. And she's not just killing it at work or in her relationships — she looks put together, too. Maybe her makeup is always impeccable. Or maybe her hair is never not on point. And maybe she has a seemingly neverending series of gorgeous handbags that are always perfectly organized. If you're anything like writer Nora Ephron , it's that last one that has you wallowing in some serious feelings of inadequacy. In her 2002 essay, "I Hate My Purse," Ephron talks about just that: how much she hates purses and all of the baggage, both literal and metaphorical, they can add to our shoulders. She writes:

"I hate my purse. I absolutely hate it. If you're one of those women who think there's something great about purses, don't even bother reading this because there is nothing here for you. This is for the women who hate their purses, who are bad at purses, who understand that their purses are reflections of their negligent housekeeping, hopeless disorganization, a chronic inability to throw anything away, and an ongoing failure to handle the obligations of a demanding and difficult accessory (the obligation, for example, that it should in someway match what you're wearing.)"

And that's just it, isn't it? Our purses mean so much more than just fashion. Ephron goes on to detail all of the different ways she tried to get around the purse problem. As a freelance writer she tried to go the super minimalist route. Often at home working, she was able to get away with packing just a lipstick, credit card and $20 bill in her pocket during nights out. Then she went the complete opposite way, buying a bag so big that she could fit too much in it — old airplane snacks in case she ever got hungry, a cosmetics back she forgot to zip and sunscreen she forgot to close, an electronic date book with no batteries and, of course, a pair of sneakers. She writes:

"Before you know it, your purse weights 20 pounds and you're in danger of getting bursitis and needing an operation just from carrying it around. Everything you own is in your purse. You could flee the Cossacks with your purse. But when you open it up, you can't find a thing in it — your purse is just a big dark hole that you spend hours fishing around for. A flashlight would help, but if you were to put it into your purse, you'd never find it."

nora ephron essay

The Most Of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron, $20, Amazon

Again, we all know that this isn't just about purses. This is about the difference between having it all together, like the girl with the perfectly organized designer tote, or falling apart at the seams as you stuff the entire contents of your studio apartment into some sort of pleather monstrosity. But, here's the thing: no one has it all together, even if their handbags make you think they do. Ephron learned this in stunning clarity on a trip to Paris with a friend, the sort of put-together woman who did think there was something great about purses. Her mission was to purchase a highly covetable (and highly expensive) vintage Hermès Kelly bag at a flea market. Let's just say, things didn't go quite according to plan. She writes:

"Anyway, my friend bought her Kelly bag. She paid twenty-six hundred dollars for it. The color wasn't exactly what she wanted, but it was in wonderful shape. Of course, it would have to be waterproofed immediately because it would lose half its value if it got caught in the rain...The two of us went to a bistro, and the Kelly bag was placed in the middle of the table, where it sat like a small shrine to a shopping victory. And then, outside, it began to rain."

It was right then and there that Ephron decided to give up on purses and, in essence, give up on the idea of "having it all together" by anyone's standards but her own. She went back to New York and bought herself a tote bag with an image of MetroCard emblazoned on its front. "It cost next to nothing," she writes, "and I will never have to replace it because it is completely indestructible. What's more, never having been in style, it can never go out of style." By ignoring all of the societal standards of what makes a great purse — i.e. what makes a great woman — Ephron found her own version of it. And really, what more can we do than that?

"And wherever I go," Ephron writes, "people say to me 'I love that bag.' 'Where did you get that bag?'...For all I know they've all gone off and bought one. Or else they haven't. It doesn't matter. I'm very happy."

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3 great essays by nora ephron.

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A Few Words about Breasts - I was boyish. I wanted desperately not to be that way, not to be a mixture of both things, but instead just one, a girl. As soft and as pink as a nursery. And nothing would do that for me, I felt, but breasts..

The Graduate - It was gritty and glamorous and everything I’d been longing for—to begin my life in New York as a journalist…

On Maintenance - Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won’t have to hide behind a stack of canned food…

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‘I Remember Nothing’: Nora Ephron’s hilarious essays

Nora Ephron has done it all. The film director, producer, screenwriter, journalist and blogger is also an author, and her new book — “I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections” — is a collection of short, funny essays about everything from aging and divorce to journalism and technology. In this excerpted essay, Ephron directs her razor-sharp wit toward e-mail.

The six stages of e-mail

Stage one: Infatuation I just got e-mail! I can’t believe it! It’s so great! Here’s my handle. Write me. Who said letter-writing was dead? Were they ever wrong. I’m writing letters like crazy for the first time in years. I come home and ignore all my loved ones and go straight to the com­puter to make contact with total strangers. And how great is AOL? It’s so easy. It’s so friendly. It’s a community. Wheeeee! I’ve got mail!

Stage two: Clarification Okay, I’m starting to understand — e-mail isn’t letter-writing at all, it’s something else entirely. It was just invented, it was just born, and overnight it turns out to have a form and a set of rules and a language all its own. Not since the printing press. Not since television. It’s revolutionary. It’s life-altering. It’s shorthand. Cut to the chase. Get to the point. It saves so much time. It takes five seconds to accomplish in an e-mail something that takes five minutes on the telephone. The phone requires you to converse, to say things like hello and good-bye, to pretend to some semblance of interest in the person on the other end of the line. Worst of all, the phone occasionally forces you to make actual plans with the people you talk to — to suggest lunch or dinner — even if you have no desire whatsoever to see them. No danger of that with e-mail. E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know.

nora ephron essay

Stage three: Confusion I have done nothing to deserve any of this: Viagra!!!!! Best Web source for Vioxx. Spend a week in Cancún. Have a rich beautiful lawn. Astrid would like to be added as one of your friends. XXXXXXXVideos. Add three inches to the length of your penis. The Demo­cratic National Committee needs you. Virus Alert. FW: This will make you laugh. FW: This is funny. FW: This is hilarious. FW: Grapes and raisins toxic for dogs. FW: Gabriel García Márquez’s Final Farewell. FW: Kurt Vonnegut’s Commencement Address. FW: The Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. AOL Member: We value your opinion. A message from Barack Obama. Find low mortgage payments, Nora. Nora, it’s your time to shine. Need to fight off bills, Nora? Yvette would like to be added as one of your friends. You have failed to establish a full connection to AOL.

Stage four: Disenchantment Help! I’m drowning. I have 112 unanswered e-mails. I’m a writer — imagine how many unanswered e-mails I would have if I had a real job. Imagine how much writ­ing I could do if I didn’t have to answer all this e-mail. My eyes are dim. My wrist hurts. I can’t focus. Every time I start to write something, the e-mail icon starts bobbing up and down and I’m compelled to check whether anything good or interesting has arrived. It hasn’t. Still, it might, any second now. And yes, it’s true — I can do in a few seconds with e-mail what would take much longer on the phone, but most of my e-mails are from people who don’t have my phone number and would never call me in the first place. In the brief time it took me to write this paragraph, three more e-mails arrived. Now I have 115 unanswered e-mails. Strike that: 116. Glub glub glub glub glub.

Stage five: Accommodation Yes. No. Can’t. No way. Maybe. Doubtful. Sorry. So sorry. Thanks. No thanks. Out of town. OOT. Try me in a month. Try me in the fall. Try me in a year. [email protected] can now be reached at [email protected].

Stage six: Death Call me.

Excerpted with permission from “I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections” by Nora Ephron (Knopf, 2010).

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Ethics — The Ethics of Graphic Photojournalism: An Analysis of Nora Ephron’s Argument

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The Ethics of Graphic Photojournalism: an Analysis of Nora Ephron's Argument

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The Morning

What groups need affirmative action.

The demise of the old version of affirmative action is likely to affect some of its previous beneficiaries much more than others.

Young protesters at an outdoor rally. One demonstrator holds a sign that says, “Solidarity is Power.”

By David Leonhardt

Two economists — Ran Abramitzky of Stanford and Leah Boustan of Princeton — embarked on an ambitious project more than a decade ago. They wanted to know how the trajectory of immigrants to the United States had changed since the 1800s. To do so, Abramitzky and Boustan collected millions of tax filings, census records and other data and analyzed upward mobility over time.

Their findings, published in a 2022 book titled “Streets of Gold,” received widespread attention. The data showed that recent immigrant families had climbed the country’s ladder at a strikingly similar pace to immigrant families from long ago, even as the profile of those immigrants has changed. “The American dream is just as real for immigrants from Asia and Latin America now as it was for immigrants from Italy and Russia 100 years ago,” Abramitzky and Boustan wrote.

As in the past, immigrants themselves tend to remain poor if they arrive poor, as many do. But as in the past, their children usually make up ground rapidly, regardless of where they come from. Within a generation or two, immigrant families resemble native families in economic terms. ( See graphics that explain the research .)

The findings were surprising partly because the American economy has been so disappointing over the past few decades. Overall upward mobility has declined sharply . Immigrants and their descendants, however, have been a glorious exception. For a mix of reasons — including their willingness to move to U.S. regions with strong economies — immigrant families have kept climbing society’s ladder.

This encouraging pattern obviously challenges the dark view of recent immigrants that conservatives sometimes offer. Yet it also challenges one part of the liberal consensus — about affirmative action.

Until the Supreme Court banned race-based affirmative action last year, many beneficiaries were descendants of recent immigrants, from Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. But if immigrant families are making progress more than the average American family, did they need affirmative action? And now that the old policy is gone, which groups of Americans are truly vulnerable?

Fairness vs. diversity

I thought about these questions while reading a new Times Magazine essay on affirmative action by my colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones. She tells the story of the policy’s beginnings in the 1960s and makes a point that is sometimes forgotten. When John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson created affirmative action, they did not do so in the name of diversity. Only later did diversity become the policy’s main rationale, largely because of a 1978 Supreme Court decision.

Affirmative action was created in the name of fairness — to address the oppression of Black Americans. That oppression has spanned not only centuries of slavery, but also policies that continued into the 20th century, such as segregation of jobs, schools and neighborhoods and whites-only mortgage subsidies. The white-Black wealth gap remains so large today partly as a result.

As Johnson said in 1965 , “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’” Or as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.”

At the time, the U.S. was about 95 percent white or Black and only about 5 percent Asian or Latino. In 1965, though, a new immigration law passed, leading to a surge in immigrants. Soon, affirmative action grew to include many of them and their descendants.

It became a program of “diversity and inclusiveness and not racial justice,” Nikole writes. Progressive groups, she notes, began to use the term “people of color.”

There are certainly arguments for this approach. Many immigrants did, and do, experience discrimination. Of course, the same was once true of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants, and their families nonetheless climbed society’s ladder. The research by Abramitzky and Boustan shows Asian and Hispanic immigrants are following a similar path. (Affirmative action itself has been too narrow a policy to be a major reason, and some versions of it already excluded Asian Americans before the Supreme Court decision.)

The continued existence of anti-Asian or anti-Hispanic hate — or antisemitism, which is on the rise, as Franklin Foer documents in The Atlantic — is outrageous. But it does not necessarily justify affirmative action for these groups. All of them fare markedly better on many metrics than Black Americans, or Native Americans , who have also endured centuries of oppression. Consider life expectancy:

Life expectancy in the U.S.

nora ephron essay

U.S. average

nora ephron essay

Affirmative action is a thorny issue, and reasonable people will have different views. Whatever your view, Nikole’s essay highlights a point worth mulling: The demise of the old version of affirmative action is likely to affect some of its previous beneficiaries much more than others. Given this country’s treatment of Black and Native Americans, they are at particular risk.

For more: I recommend you make time for the essay this weekend. In it, Nikole suggests a version of affirmative action specifically for the descendants of enslaved people.

THE LATEST NEWS

Israel-hamas war.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was an obstacle to peace and urged Israel to hold a new election .

The Palestinian Authority’s president named an adviser to be prime minister , defying international pressure to pick an outsider.

U.S. officials aren’t expecting much from the new prime minister.

Israel has supported getting more aid into Gaza, but humanitarian organizations say the new initiatives are insufficient .

Russia has an election this weekend. Vladimir Putin is all but assured another term .

Before the vote, Russia has intensified online censorship using techniques pioneered by China.

Trump Trials

Prosecutors proposed delaying Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan. They want to review new documents.

The federal judge overseeing Trump’s classified documents trial rejected an effort by his lawyers to dismiss the case.

All four criminal cases against Donald Trump have issues that have delayed the start of trials .

More on Politics

Trump backtracked on comments he made suggesting that he was open to cutting Social Security and Medicare. He told Breitbart News that he wouldn’t “jeopardize or hurt” either program .

Peter Navarro, a Trump adviser, must report to prison for defying a congressional subpoena to testify in the House’s Jan. 6 inquiry, an appeals court ruled.

Vice President Kamala Harris visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in Minnesota. It was believed to be the first official visit by a vice president to an abortion clinic.

Trump has growing support among Latinos .

SpaceX’s Starship, the biggest rocket ever to fly, completed most of its latest test flight but didn’t survive re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. NASA hopes to use the rocket’s design in coming moon missions.

TikTok would have a huge price tag. Investors might join together to buy it .

Taiwan is trying to build an alternative to Starlink , Elon Musk’s satellite internet service.

Gun Violence

A jury found a Michigan father guilty of involuntary manslaughter for failing to stop his son before a school shooting. His wife was convicted of the same charge last month.

Read about other cases in which parents have been found criminally liable after a shooting by their child.

A man was shot on a subway train in Brooklyn after getting into a fight with another passenger during rush hour. He is in critical condition.

Other Big Stories

Severe storms believed to be tornadoes hit Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio .

Sports Illustrated’s last print magazine will be in May, employees were told.

The reinstatement of SAT requirements is antiracism in action, John McWhorter writes.

One of the unavoidable sadnesses of life is that friends drift away for no particular reason , Frank Bruni writes.

Here are columns by David French on antisemitism on college campuses and Paul Krugman on the threat to Social Security and Medicare .

MORNING READS

Boom time: A warmer planet means reptiles aren’t slowing down as much in the winter — which means more business for Australia’s snake catchers .

Marketplace: Gen Z is on Facebook, but mainly for the deals .

36 Hours in Sarasota: Head to a beach with expansive views of the Florida Gulf, try gator and visit an impressive museum complex .

Lives Lived: Dan Wakefield was a prolific and acclaimed writer, producing novels, journalism, essays, criticism, screenplays and, in a memoir, an account of his path from faith to atheism and back again. He died at 91 .

Hockey hair: At Minnesota’s state hockey tournament, high school players competed for the best “salad” and “flow.”

N.F.L.: The Los Angeles Chargers traded wide receiver Keenan Allen to the Chicago Bears after Allen refused to take a pay cut.

N.H.L.: A shipment of commemorative Jaromir Jagr bobbleheads was stolen , the Pittsburgh Penguins announced.

Tennis: A “bee invasion” delayed the quarterfinal match between Carlos Alcaraz and Alexander Zverev at Indian Wells.

ARTS AND IDEAS

Cracking up: These are 22 of the funniest books since “Catch-22,” as chosen by three Times book critics. Why “Catch-22”? The 1961 novel “gave writers permission to be irreverent about the most serious stuff — the stuff of life and death,” the critics write, setting off a new era of humor in literature. Their list includes:

“Tales of the City,” by Armistead Maupin (1978)

“Heartburn,” by Nora Ephron (1983)

“Lightning Rods,” by Helen DeWitt (2011)

See the full list .

More on culture

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, debuted an Instagram account and announced what appears to be a new kitchen and lifestyle brand .

The San Francisco Symphony’s maestro said he would step down , citing differences with the orchestra’s board.

A “Squid Game” actor was found guilty in South Korea of sexual misconduct.

“What’s still a mystery is why a bunch of top secret documents were taken by a president who, by all accounts, does not read”: Jimmy Kimmel joked about Trump’s trials .

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Serve dinner in 30 minutes with this lemony shrimp and bean stew .

Make the most of your walks .

Show someone that they’re loved with a care package .

Buy a hot tub . (Why not?)

Take our news quiz .

Here is today’s Spelling Bee . Yesterday’s pangrams were bathing and inhabiting .

And here are today’s Mini Crossword , Wordle , Sudoku and Connections .

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David

P.S. Today marks Wordle’s 1,000th puzzle. To celebrate, the Empire State Building lit up in Wordle’s signature colors.

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