So that will be different. They have a great nanny, and they'll come visit me every other weekend. It basically is the greatest lesson I think you can ever give anyone. You were just supposed to curl up into a ball and move to Connecticut. They were very much in the movie business.
So I made a list of things and then wrote most of the book and sold it. Unbelievable crab and cherries and peaches. In fact, my mother drove a Studebaker for about five years, and when she traded it in, it had something like 9, 000 miles on it. She just would say, "Oh well, everything is copy. " Most people, you don't expect, when you have a piece in Vogue, to have a huge — you know, people don't buy Vogue necessarily for the articles, but this was an issue all my friends read, and a lot of people said, "Oh, that was really funny, " and I thought, "Oh, I see. It's no big deal that I'm a writer; my parents were writers. You got mail screenwriter. It was very complicated, and I thought it might be fun to do it with somebody and not have quite the burden. My first memory of my mother, which of course came up very easily when I was in therapy, was of her teaching me to read. Most of their friends were other screenwriters.
But then a few months later, I found myself at a typewriter working on a screenplay, and instead I wrote the first eight pages of a novel, and it was a novel that I knew if I could — you know, when I was going through the nightmare of the end of the marriage, I absolutely knew that there was — if I could ever find the voice to write it in, that someday it would be a story, someday it would be copy. I got to see the auditions, but the main casting was done by Mike. So all of those things were things that I learned from Mike. You got mail ephron crossword. It wasn't anything hard, and I just wrote this funny thing called "I Feel Bad About My Neck, " which everybody read, a huge number of people. There is no place like this, no place that offers what this country does. Nora Ephron: Crazy drunk. Melodramatic if you weren't involved with it, and dramatic if you were.
You know, a huge number of things, like these women who get goosed in the office and then file a lawsuit instead of just telling whoever did it to jump off a cliff. There's a book here. When did your other siblings come along? You're not going to need this kind of thing. Just forcing you to understand that if you have a bunch of scenes and they are all about exactly the same thing, at least two of them are superfluous. The sun was shining. At the time, I thought, "Oh my God, look what I have just stumbled onto! " The teacher who changed my life was my journalism teacher, whose name was Charles Simms. Now we know that alcoholism is just a disease, and they had it, and it didn't really come into full bloom until they were well into their forties. You ve got mail co screenwriter ephron. I had really nothing to do, but to sort of hang around and eavesdrop and look through files hoping to find secret documents, which I did find several of, by the way. I think that men were allowed to write about their marriages falling apart, but you weren't quite supposed to if you were a woman. You can make your own hours.
For a long time I thought it was kind of great that they did this. At a certain point, you get to a place where you kind of know what you're doing, and you kind of know that you're going to be repeating yourself if you go on doing it much longer. Can you tell us about your desire to be a writer in New York? Now, that's a very simple thing, but we would have looked foolish, and I was the only person on a set of 60 people who had ever been in a union negotiation, because I had been on the Newspaper Guild negotiating committee at the New York Post. What are you writing now? And all she meant was that someday you will make this into a funny story, or a story, and when you do, I will be happy to listen to it, but not until then. But it interested me later, when they complained about it, that I hadn't quite been sensitive to it, because it was time for me to do this. They really thought it was going to be fabulous and great, and everybody working on it thought it was, and then it comes out, and it doesn't work. She literally drove to the studio and drove back every day. A., and he became a writer. What's more fun than that, you know? Nora Ephron: In terms of everything.
So I started writing a novel that became Heartburn, and that was the thinly disguised version of the end of that marriage. How long were you there? Could you tell us about Heartburn, where you did, in fact, rather publicly turn the downfall of a marriage into a somewhat comic novel and movie? But the truth is, it was harder for them than I thought it was going to be. Calvin Trillin worked on it, too. Nora Ephron: I was born in New York, and I was really happy for the first four years of my life, and then my parents moved to California, and as far as I was concerned, my life was over, ruined. She was a rapper in some way that was so brilliant. I was a child of privilege, but m y husband, Nick Pileggi, is first generation, first generation B. Do you have a concept of that? But it's a big deal that they were writers. Nora Ephron: I was a mail girl at Newsweek.
Were there books that you really remember loving as a kid? I realized many years later that I was probably the only woman who had ever worked in the White House that Kennedy didn't make a pass at. As it turned out, Alice and I went to Oklahoma together, but what was great was that we worked together and had a huge amount of fun doing it. If you were talking to a young female writer who is watching or reading your interview, what advice would you have for somebody who is looking at journalism or writing as a career? Was there a lot of verbal jousting? Our children couldn't read at that point, but nonetheless, he thrilled to be the "good" parent. Being the first is the best.
Nora Ephron: I had this fantastic internship, I thought. I always worry I didn't teach it well enough to my own kids, because I was such a good mother. I was a newspaper reporter. That's the kind of stuff you have to know. You had an internship at the White House. That must have been rather cathartic.
Whatever horrible thing is happening to you, there is always this other thing thinking, "Hmm, better remember this. Did that have anything to do with your negative feelings about California? So there were two of you by the time you moved to Southern California? I was at nursery school surrounded by happy, laughing children, and all I could think was, "What am I doing here? It was a very small staff. And they said, "Oh, you're Italian American.
You know, Superman is the key to everything. Nora Ephron: It was the tail end of it. I knew nothing about fashion. I was standing out at the Rose Garden on a Friday afternoon, along with everyone else in the White House, watching the President leave. But you know, I didn't have a sense of them as much as writers as I did as screenwriters. Nora Ephron: I didn't think of going into film until I was well into my thirties. It's a funny book, and I was very happy that it sold a lot of copies. Was there any dynamic there that was particularly telling, being the oldest of four? Were you involved in that? I know how to write in more than one way, which is one of the luckiest things about my life, but I think failure is very hard, because you don't really know. That's how it worked in those days. It's one of the sad things.
And I went to Wellesley because I had gone to a slide show, and it had a really beautiful campus. I just fell in love with the idea that underneath, if you sifted through enough facts, you could get to the point, and you had to get to the point.