Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
I feel like, if you’re a certain type of person (a person who reads for the love of language, who enjoys fast-paced, witty/sarcastic dialogue, who is able to recognize a fellow introvert at 100 paces) and if you came of age at a specific time period (late 90s, early aughts), then there’s no need for me to explain who Nora Ephron is. For everybody else, the author is also a screenwriter, a director & a producer, who can count among her many successes the likes of When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, & (a personal favorite), My Blue Heaven. Basically, if you were looking for a snappy, smart-witted RomCom at the time, you couldn’t go wrong with a Nora Ephron script. Sadly, Ephron died in 2012, leaving big shoes that, so far, seem unfillable.
I read Ephron’s fictionalized mostly-memoir of the failure of her first marriage, Heartburn, while I was in high school, which is longer ago than seems logical, but see earlier text, RE: “coming of age in the late 90s.” I loved it because, even while her life was falling apart, the main character kept a hamster-wheel whir of words in her mind at all times, sometimes broken up by random recipes & was adept at throwing out sarcastic asides as necessary. Which is exactly how my brain works, except, in addition to recipes, also include song lyrics from thirty-year-old commercials, the medical history of my entire family, and whether or not a certain type of poison kills fast enough for it to make sense in whatever nonsense I’m currently attempting to write.
I’ve had her actual memoirs – I Feel Bad About My Neck, & I Remember Nothing – in Mount TBR for, basically forever, but every time I thought about reading them (or her other books), I felt like it would be too sad, because she isn’t around anymore, so I waited. And suddenly, last week, something hit the hyperfocus button in my brain, and only memoirs, really good memoirs would do, and I finally felt like I could listen to the books without feeling overly forlorn about it, and I’m so glad I did.
I’m going to restate my suggestion that, if you’re at all an audiobook person, and a memoir is read by the author? Read it that way. Because the thing about Nora Ephron is that she has a very distinctive writer’s voice, a way of putting words that identifies her to a reader, or as someone who’s watched her movies. It’s an old-fashioned Nick-and -Nora style of bickering, an attention to minute details, and an ease with the perfect metaphor that hits all the right buttons for so many of her fans, and listening to her actual voice read her words just gives her narrative voice an extra little bump.
These are also not specifically memoirs, in my opinion, because it’s clear that Ephron is not just sitting down and typing out her life story. Instead, she’s sharing all these slices of her life – peppering through her life’s timeline w/little Polaroids & snapshots of things that mattered to her on a particular day, or recurring thoughts she felt she must share, or glimpses into the minutia of her days & somehow connecting those tiny points of time into the whole experience of being a human. How that changes, or doesn’t change, as you get older. How it sometimes seems as if we are so alone, so isolated, in our own specific situations, and yet, somehow, have never managed to have an original thought or moment in our entire lives. Things she wished she’d handled better, things she wished she remembered better, things she was sure did not matter at all, but shared anyways, and was shocked when they did manage to feel important to someone else after all.
Given that this is the type of writing I like to write, it is no shock to recognize it is also the style of writing I love to read.
And, because I cannot improve upon her own words, a selection of quotes to round things out.
“One good thing I’d like to say about divorce is that it sometimes makes it possible for you to be a much better wife to your next husband because you have a place for your anger; it’s not directed at the person you’re currently with.”
“When and how did it happen that you absolutely have to have a manicure. I don’t begin to know the answer, but I want to leave the question out there, floating around in the atmosphere as a reminder that just when you think you know exactly how many things you have to do to yourself where maintenance is concerned, another can pop up out of nowhere and take a huge bite out of your life.”
“What a failure of imagination had caused me to forget that life was full of other possibilities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?”
And lastly, I hope whatever you’re reading, it gives you the literary equivalent of the bends:
“There’s something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can’t tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he’s liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can’t adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All this happens to me when I surface from a great book.”