In her early days, she was a reporter at The New York Post, where 'everyone smoked, but there were no ashtrays. This omnibus goes far in clarifying who Ephron was, not just as a sentimental favorite, but as a writer and thinker.

Many of Ephron's friends and fans were left to reminisce intensely about her, or to try and figure her out and sort of open her up like a Chinese puzzle box. 'She continued to give me invaluable advice about everything,' he wrote, 'from career to restaurants, from what to read to what to think.' Rich concludes that, in making her decision to keep her illness private, 'For all the instructions she gave us and everyone else about life, she was teaching us something about dying, and we had no idea at the time she was doing so.' In New York Magazine, Frank Rich wrote eloquently of her generosity to younger writers who were just starting out, and of how good she was to him in all ways. The Most of Nora Ephron gives you a close-up and thorough view of the writer, which seems a particularly important thing to do, because her death was met with such an emotional response.

As her editor Robert Gottlieb writes in the introduction, this massive book was meant 'to celebrate the richness of her work, the amazing arc of her career, and the place she had come to hold in the hearts of countless readers.' Gottlieb and Ephron started to work on the book together, but somehow it didn't get done, and he wonders if it was because Ephron, knowing she was ill but telling very few people, began to see the book as 'a memorial,' which made her uncomfortable. At various points in her life she was a reporter, a journalist, an essayist, a screenwriter, a novelist, a playwright, and even, briefly, a blogger. When Nora Ephron died in June of 2012, she left behind a big, diverse body of work that spanned decades and genres.

I'm always amazed at what does or doesn't last –– what seems fresh as time passes, or what takes on that dreaded sepia tint even just a year or two later. When writers die, it's hard to know if their work will live on. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Most of Nora Ephron Author Nora Ephron

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