Nora Ephron’s Life as a Writer in Four Interviews

With a Few Lessons to Share

Nora Ephron: the life of a writer who had it all (composite image by the author, with photos by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels + Engin Akyurt and yugifrias from Pixabay)

I‘ve recently read Nora Ephron’s The Last Interview and Other Conversations (2015) and the four interviews in this slim volume struck me as inspiring and useful for writers.

You may know Nora Ephron from some of the best romantic comedies of the nineties. It happens, though, that she’s also one of the first famous women who made it as a freelancer — in the seventies, no less. As she says in the fourth interview, she was inspired, along with her three writer sisters, by the career of her screenwriter (and playwright) mother, Phoebe Ephron, who wrote several movies with Ephron’s father, Henry, in the forties, fifties, and sixties.

The first interview: “Nice to See Nora Happy in Her Work.”

The first interview, by Michael S. Lasky, published in Writer’s Digest in 1974, offers many intriguing tidbits of Ephron’s beginnings as a writer.

Nora Ephron first worked in the editorial office of Newsweek as support, copying and clipping articles, as Newsweek did not take on women writers at the time — something that eventually led to a class action lawsuit for sexual discrimination.

After Newsweek, she got a job as a reporter for the New York Post, where she…