“The same plan I had in mind”
The book that came to mind when I heard this question was Nora Ephron Collected, which I first read in 2003. I had just finished college and moved to New York. My best friend sent me a used paperback copy for my twenty-second birthday. The book had been published twelve years earlier. I started reading and I was just so captivated by it that I read the whole thing in one sitting, and then I read it again.
Here I was, another recovering English major. I’d focused on Victorian literature. Vanity Fair and Bleak House are two of the most important novels I’ve ever read, and I’m sure I’ll read them many more times in the future. But Nora Ephron tapped into my experience and helped me make sense of it like no book had before.
Smith College, my alma mater, is this incredibly progressive place for women, but at least when I was there, the English department and its syllabi were still pretty focused on the classics, and most of them are books by men. I loved that Ephron was writing about real women and real life.
A couple years later, Penguin reissued the 1958 novel The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe. I love that book, too, and everyone I knew was reading it. Everyone I knew worked in publishing, after all. I worked at a women’s magazine, and we talked for hours over drinks and coffee and more drinks and more coffee about how different things were for women now in New York and then also how many things hadn’t changed at all. Then I realized there was an essay about the book in Nora Ephron Collected. Of course. Ephron wrote: “It occurred to me as I read The Best of Everything that it would be practically impossible to write an accurate novel about the quality of life for single women in New York without writing a B novel for the simple reason that life for single women in New York is a B novel.”
I loved that. Nora Ephron’s essays spoke to all these different parts of me. Like the part that discovered Dorothy Parker in high school and thought I was the only one. Ephron had an amazing essay about her own relationship with Parker in this book. It was a wonder to discover all of these women who had come to New York in different decades with the same plan in mind, the same plan that I myself had in mind.
I loved the freshness of her voice and her humor. I dreamed of writing the way Nora Ephron did. I still dream of writing the way Nora Ephron did.
In 2005, I got a job at the New York Times, working in part for the columnist Gail Collins. I kept Nora Ephron Collected on my desk. It turned out that Gail and Nora were friends. Sometimes Nora even came to our office parties. But I could never gather up the courage to talk to her.
After my novel Maine was released, one day, to my great shock, she e-mailed me. She had read the book and was so kind about it. She invited me to lunch. That was one of the most thrilling days of my life.
Over lunch, we talked about books and Lena Dunham and feminism and my upcoming wedding. She knew everything about everything, including those male-centric classics I’d studied in college. I was working on The Engagements, and I told her that one of the characters in my novel was based on one from Bleak House. Without hesitation, she said, “Of course, Mrs. Jellyby. She’s my favorite.”
She died a few months later, which was heartbreaking. I felt like she had so much left to say. But it was wonderful to learn then that she had encouraged so many other women writers, too.
There is still no experience in life to which I cannot apply a Nora Ephron quote. When I’m writing an essay, I always read her before I start, because she’s so funny, so smart, and packs so many gems into each sentence. Now that I’m no longer working in an office, I don’t keep that book on my desk anymore. I keep it on my nightstand.
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J. Courtney Sullivan’s novels include Commencement, Maine, and The Engagements, the latter soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon.