Nora Ephron Interview (page: 8 / 8) Humorist, Novelist, Screenwriter and Director	Print Interview

Lately, your book about your neck has gotten tremendous attention and has sold a lot of copies. Here again, you seem to be taking something almost taboo -- a woman's aging -- and turning it upside-down and making it very, very funny and cathartic, at least for your readers. Was that a difficult book to contemplate?

Nora Ephron: No, no. I had been reading all these books about getting older. When you go through menopause, there are all these books out there called things like "The Joy of Menopause," and you think, "What is this book about? What relevance does this book have to anything I am familiar with?" None whatsoever. And then ten years later, as I went into my sixties, there were all these books about how fabulous it was to be older and how you are going to have the greatest sex of your life in your sixties. I don't know why people write things like that, because they're just lies, but then I thought, there might be a circumstance that you could have the greatest sex of your life in your sixties -- if you had never had sex until then, maybe. This stuff was all out there, and I kept thinking, "Why are people writing this? Why are people saying this? Don't they have necks? Don't they look in the mirror?"

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One day, someone -- an editor at Vogue -- called me and said they were doing an issue on age and was there anything that I wanted to write about, and I said, "Yeah. I want to write about my neck." It wasn't anything hard, and I just wrote this funny thing called "I Feel Bad About My Neck," which everybody read, a huge number of people. Most people, you don't expect, when you have a piece in Vogue, to have a huge -- you know, people don't buy Vogue necessarily for the articles, but this was an issue all my friends read, and a lot of people said, "Oh, that was really funny," and I thought, "Oh, I see. There's a book here. There's a book about getting older," and I started making a list of things that I thought could be written about that no one had written about, like maintenance, which is a full time career for those of us who are getting on in years, just sort of keeping your finger in the dike, so that you don't look like a bag lady. So I made a list of things and then wrote most of the book and sold it. And then there's all sorts of things that aren't about aging, like my summer in the White House when President Kennedy didn't sleep with me.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

You must have had quite a response from women, thanking you for telling it like it is.

Nora Ephron: Yes. Yes.

Well, you look marvelous.

Nora Ephron: Well thank you, darling.

Sometimes we ask our honorees to talk about the American Dream. Do you have a concept of that?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nora Ephron: I've always had a very clear sense -- since I was a kid, reading books about people who didn't live in the United States -- about how lucky I was to live here. There's no place like it. I remember, after 9/11, there was a lot of foolish talk about, "Where we would go if we had to leave this place?" which I just thought was so idiotic. I couldn't believe it, because where could you go? Where could you possibly go? Nowhere. There is no place like this, no place that offers what this country does.

[ Key to Success ] The American Dream

In terms of freedom?

Nora Ephron: In terms of everything. It's no big deal that I'm a writer; my parents were writers. But it's a big deal that they were writers. It's a big deal that they went to college. They were first-generation Americans, first-generation college graduates, and they became screenwriters. I was a child of privilege, but...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. My husband, Nick Pileggi, is first generation, first generation B.A., and he became a writer. He and I are one generation different, not in our ages, but in our parents' experience. That wouldn't have happened to him in another place, and it almost didn't happen here, by the way, because he was in junior high school and was assigned -- got his schedule in junior high school -- and he was in all vocational classes. And he went to the guidance person and said, "Why am I not in English classes? Why don't I have any classes like my friends have?" and they said, "Oh, you're Italian American. You're not going to need this kind of thing. You're not going to go to college." That was New York City! But he fooled them and switched out of it, but the point is you still hear stories like that, stories from people like Mario Cuomo, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who couldn't get a job after she graduated from law school. There's still a lot of that stuff, and yet, compared to anyplace else, this is by far the best place you could be.

[ Key to Success ] The American Dream

Obstacles can be significant in growth and progress. What have your occasional failures taught you?

Nora Ephron: I wish I had learned more from failure than just mortification. I don't think you learn much from success, and I don't think you learn much from failure, unfortunately. It's one of the sad things. You certainly learn that it's more fun to have a hit than a flop. That's one thing you truly learn.

What keeps you going after a flop?

Nora Ephron: Well, I'm a writer, and I'm very lucky because I don't always have to write the same kind of thing. I know how to write in more than one way, which is one of the luckiest things about my life, but I think failure is very hard, because you don't really know. You really don't know. People see things that don't work, and they think, "Didn't they know that wasn't going to work?" Well they didn't! They really didn't. They really thought it was going to be fabulous and great, and everybody working on it thought it was, and then it comes out, and it doesn't work. It really doesn't work, and you go, "Hmm, too bad that didn't work." But you don't learn. I wish one learned more. It certainly doesn't keep you from failing again, I'll tell you that.

What are the differences between directing your own writing, and writing for projects that you don't direct?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nora Ephron: The good thing about directing your own writing is you have no one to blame but yourself, and I'm a big one for that. I would much rather blame myself than have the alibi of saying, "That wasn't my idea." That's the greatest thing. Also, when you write something, you really do hear how you want it said. Sometimes it isn't said that way. It's said much better, because you have a really great actor saying it, and they come at it in a completely different way. And sometimes you have a really great actor who missed the joke, and you have a chance to say to them, "No, no, no. I think the word here you're missing is this," or you can at least be there on behalf of the script as the director. But you have a very clear idea when you write something of what you want it to look like.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

I'm writing something now that I know I'm not going to direct, and there's a great freedom in that. There's a great freedom in not always having to know everything about what's going to happen in the scene, and knowing that if it gets made, it will be someone else's problem what the room looks like, what the improv is at the beginning or the end of the scene, all of that stuff.

What are you writing now? Can you talk about what it is?

Nora Ephron: Oh no, because it probably won't happen.

With your track record, maybe it will. Thank you for the great interview.

Nora Ephron: Thank you. It was great.

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