Mariella Gattini

I’ve always loved Nora Ephron and her humorous take on sadness. In I Feel Bad About My Neck, published in 2006, six years before her death, she reveals more than she wanted. Her real uneasiness was with getting old and sick. She couldn’t help but tell what was going on with her, somehow. In 2012, according to the New York Post, she finally succumbed to pneumonia triggered by an acute case of myeloid leukemia.

I’ve been working on a novel set in New York City, so I’ve been reading about it from different points of view, and she was, and still is in a way, the quintessential NYC girl—professional, accomplished, and talented—who after her battles to assert herself in that environment gets to live up to her early seventies, on average.

I was particularly perplexed to realize that the protagonist of the story I’m working on is not that different from her. Nora says in the book that at the lowest point in her life she was saved by a building. And a few pages later she states that, unconsciously, her apartment became the symbol of what she would have most hated to lose. The building in question is The Apthorp, a high-end apartment building in the Upper West Side of New York City, which recently underwent a massive renovation and has been divided into condos for sale. In the early 80’s, she rented an 8-room apartment there for her and her kids for $1,500, protected by a rent-stabilization law in effect at the time (although she had to pay $24,000 in key money for the right to move in). The protagonist of my story is also saved by a building but in different circumstances, and somewhere else in Manhattan.

Even in the movie You’ve Got Mail (1998), a romantic comedy, I noticed a certain melancholy coming from her, despite the high-spirited script and positive ending that we can see on the surface. In between lines, there is always a disheartening sense of the brutal reality people have to endure in a hard and many times cold environment that the anonymity of a big city always brings with it.

She, herself, states that she had an extraordinary ability to make lemonade. For that very same reason, I believe she was always telling the best part of it, with a sense of humor that helped her, and the reader, palliate the sour side of what she was not really mentioning.

I agree with her when it comes to the products that promise eternal youth. Over and over again we receive the same message: You’re not getting old really, you’re just letting yourself go. Buy this or that; it’s your fault if you don’t look your best. 50’s is the new 40’s—that’s the most comical one.

In the 90’s when the law changed, her landlord started to increase the rent and she paid what she was asked for a while before she finally moved, because she says in the book she wasn’t ready to divorce her apartment.

It’s easy to write about her, she was overt, funny, generous, and witty, everything we admire in women who dare to be themselves, stick their necks out, and conquer whatever they set themselves to conquer. And, as a consequence, they pay with their lives, or with their necks to be precise.

She was 64 years old when she wrote the book. At that age, she reassures us, there is no point to stop eating bread, and when she wanted to get in shape, something always happened that made her stop. Like when she suffered from two frozen shoulders at once.

Nora is funny, but in a way that conveys a fight against sadness. She reminds me of my mother and my auntie Laura. They had the most tragic lives, but they got together only to make fun of their bad luck. It was a joy to listen to them. In the same way, it is so uplifting to know that a writer like Nora Ephron still has the power to make us laugh, or at least smile, way after her death.

If she were alive, I’m sure she would have found a way to make fun of the dreadful situation we find ourselves in the world today, which is not much different from the way she left it in 2012—only more acute.

There was something that she took very seriously, though, and that was the death of her friends Judy and Henry. She found it so unfair and depressing. She deliberately tried different clichés to show the way we cope with the inevitable, among them: “Consider the Alternative,” the title of one of her chapters. In it I can feel her spirit and energy. It’s a very simple but sad piece. The entire book is like that, witty, simple, yet sad since she valued honesty overall. Like in most of her writing, she tried to put a positive spin on everything until she couldn’t. It is clear to me that she was suffering, and when you are, you can’t really hide it.

I’m going to leave you with something she said, that I’m beginning to experience: “I Hate My Purse,” the title of another chapter. You should read it, I really recommend it; it’s hilarious and true.

The moment I’m able to go out only with my smartphone in hand, apart from feeling proud of myself, my first words will be dedicated to her. With no hesitation I’ll say: Look, Nora, we don’t need our purses anymore!