Remembering Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron died yesterday. I could’ve said 'passed away', but Nora would understand, died is ok. Who is Nora Ephron? If Google led you to this page while you were searching about some movie or the other, you probably know who she is. If you landed here searching for "Mallu movie hot bathing scene", you would skip out of here faster than a heartbeat. You and I both know there is nothing of your interest here, the hot bath is ready for you in the next site over.

Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron, for me - the unknown non-American viewer(female),  who has physically inhabited American geography and culture for a really long time, is the intelligent laughter that stirs me amidst indistinct forgettable celebrity chatter that fills up the media ether around here. I have watched many of her movies starting from Silkwood, but have to watch all the movies she did post-2000.

Although well known as a director and script writer, my personal affection for her stems from reading her essays. Smart and sassy yet relatable to every woman, her words were witty and thought provoking at the same time. I am sad I had to use past tense in the previous line.

As I drove to work this morning, I heard one of her quotes from an earlier NPR interview, "I think it's like a lot of things about getting older — you have absolutely no imagination that this is actually going to happen to you, you think for quite a while you're going to be the only person who doesn't need reading glasses, or the only person who doesn't go through menopause… and in the end, the only person who isn't going to die. And then you suddenly are faced with whichever of those things it is, and you can't believe how unimaginative you have been about what it actually consists of."

Again her words, simple yet so wise make an impression on me. Nora’s death from leukemia is one of those few celebrity deaths that actually makes me stop in my tracks and worry about my own mortality and ponder about the vacuum left by their passing in my own intellectual future, just like that of Christopher Hitchens, Randy Pausch and Carl Sagan.