I Remember Everything: My Relationship with Nora Ephron By Maddie Schumacher

I get too attached. This is true about my relationship with Nora Ephron.  

I am aware of the cautions against heroes and fandom. To be a fan is to constantly reckon with your position in a one-sided relationship. It is to love someone who may never love you back. It can make you combative. It can make you fall in love with the part of yourself that is in love with the marvel. Because, of course, not only do I obsess over Nora Ephron, but for a very long time, I thought I was the only one. 

Nora Ephron entered my life in the way she entered most of my generation's life: When Harry Met Sally. 

When Harry Met Sally is one of the most important films of the twentieth century. And I reckon that sounds like opinion, but I think we should collectively treat it as fact. 

Think about it. It's New York City spanning the 80s. It's Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in Levi's denim and cable knit sweaters. Classic Upper West Side Liberalism. Landmarks like Katz’s Deli, The Apthorp on 79th street (I went to the pediatrician in this building), and Zabar’s. It’s friendship and love, and what happens when the two combine. 

It's perfect. It's familiar  (I grew up on the Upper West Side). Nora Ephron wrote the screenplay.  

However, once you know Nora Ephron, it's impossible to remove her from the film. She is all over it. Carrie Fisher’s definition of a horrible woman being “Thin. Pretty. Big tits. Your basic nightmare” was Nora Ephron’s definition too. 

The first time I watched the film, I couldn't have been older than eight. But I got every line. As an artist, those first couple of films you watch transcend even age and logic. It's simply a feeling.

Shortly after watching, I watched the rest of Nora Ephron’s filmography: some including Heartburn, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. They are perfect films. They made up my understanding of deep affection. They are perfectly imperfect, Nora Ephron. For a good portion of my childhood, Ephron’s films made every bad day good. 

But reading Nora Ephron immeasurably changed my life. 

Long before Nora Ephron wrote films, she wrote essays. 

Reading her essays validated the genre of autobiography for my young, impressionable mind. I was maybe fourteen, realizing what a personal essay could exclaim. Personal essays had this necessity as a tool to “make sense.” And Ephron made sense of every human feeling in a way I had never experienced before. Now, Ephron wasn't the first to do so. Ephron will be remembered with many writers who lived out loud in a similar fashion. But Ephron crossed my desk first. The order in which you meet your literary heroes will always matter. Perhaps, you never really forget your first. 

It had never occurred to me in early high school that someone could write about their feelings without the risk of seeming too self-involved. It also had never occurred to me that an audience could care. But maybe that was just the brilliance of Ephron: she made everyone care and made everyone feel the casualty of going out to lunch with a friend. 

I got competitive with this obsession pretty quickly. Because Ephron's gift was writing to you, not at you. My gift (and maybe delusion) was believing we were family. She was mine and only mine. When other literary-minded friends of mine brought her up, I needed to keep my relationship with Ephron strictly monogamous. 

But then you go to college and your views expand because they have to…

By my sophomore year of college, I recommended her work to anyone who would listen. Maybe that's growing up with your favorite art. You no longer have to define your love as individual to be valid. You recommend films and essay collections that keep you awake at night. You share the wealth of something you have always known. It no longer really matters who knew first.

Around the same time, I declared a creative writing minor. Everything I know about writing I know from reading. Like Ephron, I felt this compulsive need to document life relentlessly. Slowly, I managed to express myself through personal essays, too. This felt like power. It felt powerful to be twenty and know exactly why I was writing. It felt like this long obsession had a direction. There was a point to studying the Ephron bible because I was becoming a priest. 

Ephron was always such an alive presence in my life that it never occurred to me that she was long gone. Ephron passed in 2012. I was eight. Yet, rewatching her films and constantly annotating a new collection of hers made her feel tangible. It was almost as if I could reach out and touch her. 

Around the end of my sophomore year of college, I noticed I was running out of her books. I had successfully completed every essay collection except one. I vowed not to buy it, to keep her going in my mind. But I also knew I needed a finale. A book to remember as my last time reading something brand new. 

To read or not to read? I debated this for longer than I care to admit.

I have a hard time with endings, with change. There are television shows I will never finish to save myself the grief (I still have one episode left of The West Wing and I watched it five years ago). I don't want an ending to Ephron. I don't want to believe this woman isn't still cruising the halls of the Apthorp. To me, she is still there. Still trying her best to make us all care. 

By the summer going into my junior year of college, I decided to let my worries go and pick up a copy of Nora’s final collection. There was something deeply parasocial about reading her final book. The book is titled I Remember Nothing which is ironic as I remember everything. Her life, her insecurities, her sorrows, and her joy had always been inscribed in my mind. Now reading her 2010 collection, it struck me, I wasn't the only one in our relationship keeping score. Her life was flashing before me on the page. A younger Ephron lamented lighter complaints. In her essay titled “What I Will Miss,” I worried I wouldn't be able to stomach it. She writes “My kids. Spring. Fall. A walk in the park. The idea of a walk in the park…” While at the time of publication, her diagnosis of Myelodysplastic syndrome was private, reading this piece made it all the more clear that time was running out. Her narrative sprouted from a place of goodbye. Reading it felt synonymous with watching a loved one take their last breath. 

This felt like a form of anticipatory grief, preparing me for the real deal. This felt intimate. A total end of a chapter. 

As I write this, I worry I am coming across too dramatically. But perhaps my own goodbye to Ephron really was dramatic. Our ending felt so final because saying goodbye to the newness of Ephron was also saying goodbye to the childhood I met her in. 

She was there through all stages of my girlhood: slumber parties and wisdom teeth removal. She was there at graduation. Just for me. Ephron had the answers to questions I never knew to ask. I would somehow always find a new essay a couple of months before I'd need it. 

Who do I look to now? I still need a teacher even if my role as student is fleeting.

Yet, I am met with a new thought: maybe the testimony of art is the fans privilege to carry it on. Maybe my attachment to Ephron is immortal because she's made her way into my heart. If I can keep her with me, nothing ends. Rather, her words live on through my own. So: I will never stop rereading Ephron’s genius. I will never stop showing every man in my life Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan's undeniable chemistry. 

I cannot prove that my connection to Nora Ephron is singular because perhaps her gift, her real gift that is, was making everyone believe this, too. I know Nora Ephron meant something special to every person who knew her, watched her films, or read her stories. But I like to believe, somehow, I knew her better than the rest. After all, I grew up holding her hand. 

I miss her, and we never met. 

But alas, maybe I just get too attached…