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"  I met Nora Ephron at one of those parties where women like her will be accosted by people trying to slip their Chardonnay into her circle, where women like me will get her eyes for four anonymous minutes, and go home grateful. She was with her husband Nick Pileggi and a few years ago I&amp;#039;d read Heartburn and so on this evening I thought, Good, you have it right now and you deserve it, because when he put his arm around her shoulder and she moved into it like routine, she seemed to understand that she wasn&amp;#039;t lucky, she was deserving. We talked about Citarella, the best places in the city to buy cheese, some quiet Italian on the Upper East Side. The silly standard New York things that I would repeat later to girlfriends I knew would care not because Nora Ephron was a bold name but because she was that girl-woman sitting in the front of the lecture hall, in funny shoes with perfectly imperfect hair or something less banal because she is Nora Ephron and not someone trying to do her justice when she&amp;#039;s just died. Not because she was &amp;quot;one of us&amp;quot; but because she was better than one of them.  There&amp;#039;s a line in Heartburn, &amp;quot;Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn and I&amp;#039;ll show you a real asshole.&amp;quot;  No shit. But nobody writes that. Women don&amp;#039;t write that stuff. And she wasn&amp;#039;t some anti-feminist cynic either. She wrote some of the best romantic comedies of the past two decades. Sleepless in Seattle is something you can watch when you&amp;#039;re sick, when you&amp;#039;re in love, when you&amp;#039;re in hate, when you&amp;#039;re in loss. You can watch it a thousand times and visit Seattle because of it and come home and watch it again and think you must have missed the right certain pier. She wrote about orgasms like a woman who was smart enough to understand everything about an orgasm. She wrote for Cosmopolitan under Helen Gurley Brown in a way that would make me read women&amp;#039;s magazines today. In Heartburn she talks about her famous vinaigrette. About making that vinaigrette through the pain of having been left by her husband (a man &amp;quot;who is capable of having sex with a Venetian blind&amp;quot;) for a woman who looked like a &amp;quot;giraffe with big feet.&amp;quot; What you have to understand if you&amp;#039;re a man is that Heartburn is more than an anthem for women who have been cheated on. It&amp;#039;s the epitome of making lemonade. It&amp;#039;s for every time you have been stomped on and whining about it, it&amp;#039;s for having some unseen force with the heart and bosom of your mother but the deadpan shoulder shrug of the grim reaper saying, Okay so get over it already. So the vinaigrette is more than a salve, it&amp;#039;s a freaking recipe and not in a metaphorical sense. A recipe in a book about cheating. Because when all is said and done, you come out with yourself, and you make your coq au vin and you make your Julia Child opus and you say Fuck you to the people who hurt you, you say it in a million different ways and fifteen unique evenings of roux. Because it was a book about love, like almost every heroine in every movie and every book she wrote, Nora Ephron knew how to be in love and then she knew how to love herself more for not being an asshole, for being, as she once said, &amp;quot;not the victim of your life, but the heroine.&amp;quot; So I didn&amp;#039;t know Nora Ephron. I wouldn&amp;#039;t rank on the top fifty conversations she&amp;#039;s had with anonymous aspirants at a Tuesday night awards dinner. So talking about her, I feel silly, like I want to talk about her right, like as one of the ten billion younger women who want to one day be a woman like her, I want to not be a leaf-gaping asshole. In an old issue of Esquire, there&amp;#039;s a story about Helen Gurley Brown that made me fall more in love with Helen Gurley Brown but even more than that it made me fall in love with Nora Ephron. It was just cool, it was a cool story about a cool woman written by a cool woman. It made me sad that there aren&amp;#039;t more of them around, but it made me grateful that Nora Ephron was around. So right now I&amp;#039;m as sad as someone can be, who didn&amp;#039;t know her. Sad in that way you can feel general loss in a specific coring way, the loss of an intelligent cool breath in a city of falling leaves. Nora Ephron died tonight, and if you&amp;#039;re a man you lose a woman that if you&amp;#039;re lucky, should remind you of your wife. If you&amp;#039;re a woman you lose a woman that, if you&amp;#039;re smart enough, should remind you of what you can hope to be, if you cast the bullshit aside and say what&amp;#039;s on your mind and feel what&amp;#039;s in your heart, and don&amp;#039;t mind writing the romantic comedy for a bunch of leaf-changers who will love you even if they don&amp;#039;t understand precisely why they do. You lose someone who didn&amp;#039;t mind the Chardonnay in her face, because she was going home anyway to make the vinaigrette. TOM JUNOD: Nora Ephron&amp;#039;s Afterlife TOM CHIARELLA: Nora Ephron, Everything Woman CHARLES P. PIERCE: Nora Ephron and the Rowdies at the Brim STEPHEN MARCHE: What Was Nora Ephron&amp;#039;s Greatest Line? AND DON&amp;#039;T FORGET: ...What She Was Having "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a14651/nora-ephron-obituary-10073426/?hootPostID=ed5e54d1f63c8c08f0a2a782a194b90a>