What Nora taught me

Or, why I am writing this in a bikini.

I’d like to say I’m writing this post right now in my fruit-print bikini. Nora would be proud of me. But unfortunately the drawer containing my bikini is hard to pull open, and I’m not feeling very skinny today.

Nora would say these weren’t excuses. But she almost had me sliding open my mirrored closet doors and whipping of my Nike leggings. Almost.

The thing is, I just finished reading one of Nora’s delightful memoirs — Nora Ephron, that is. It’s called I feel bad about my neck, and other thoughts on being a woman. My mother told me I’d like it.

In one of the closing chapters, Nora (because we’re on first-name basis, which she inadvertently encouraged me to do in chapter three), describes a conversation she is having with a magazine editor who wants her to write on ‘Age’. Apparently fifty isn’t the new forty, nor is it the new thirty or twenty. Twenty is the new twenty.

“Oh how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six,” Nora laments. “If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini and don’t take it off until your thirty-four.”

It’s going to a be cold twelve years for me.

Among other gems of wisdom, Nora explains how to become a writer: “I write a magazine article about having small breasts. I am now a writer.”

And she assuages my fear that it’s not okay to have imaginary friends who are actually real people. And that it’s okay if these imaginary friends who are actually real people don’t actually bear any resemblance the real person at all.

Also, that all my life’s ambitions are waiting for me in New York, that other women struggle to have neatly organised handbags and they also constantly lose things in their own houses. Plus, it’s okay to pine after food that doesn’t exist anymore and wax lyrical about how good it is to read books.

I always liked to imagine that my inability to be on time or to not break nice things or to only lose my expensive possessions made me some kind of erratic but loveable heroine, not dissimilar to a character in one of Nora’s films. Nora also assured me that imagining you’re someone else in your head is completely okay too.

Most of all, Nora taught me the delight in being erratic and strange. Own it! she implores me, throwing her hands in the air. (This is the imaginary Nora speaking now.)

Some people will think you’re strange, but the rest will think you’re fantastic, imaginary Nora continues. Either way, they won’t forget you.

You’ll find your way in the way life often happens: by surprise.

Oh, and “there’s no point making pie crust from scratch