Week One: The Nora Ephron Deep Dive

Here’s what Nora Ephron understood that most of us don’t: the thing you’re most ashamed of is probably your most interesting material.

She wrote about her neck. Her actual neck. The part of her body that was ageing in ways she found humiliating and couldn’t control. She wrote about it with such specificity, such honest vanity, such refusal to pretend she was above caring, that millions of women read it and thought: “Oh thank god, it’s not just me.”

She wrote about her divorce from Carl Bernstein (yes, that Carl Bernstein, the Watergate one) while she was seven months pregnant with his child and he was having an affair with someone else. She wrote about it in a novel called Heartburn that was so thinly veiled everyone knew exactly who everyone was. She turned her humiliation into bestselling material. She made bank on her heartbreak.

And somehow, instead of making her seem bitter or petty or pathetic, it made her seem... magnificent.

How did she pull that off?

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