Nora ephron if i had a religion

As a 40-something woman, Nora Ephron lives in my periphery as someone I wanted to know more about. I read her I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman in my 30s and loved her witty observations and the friendly heads-up. As a young person, I loved some of her movies, especially When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail. After reading Kristin Marguerite Doidge's Nora Ephron: A Biography, I feel that now know more about her, but was missing an emotional connection that comes from reading a window-to-the-soul type of biography. Maybe this connection can only be evoked by a memoir, my usual nonfiction choice for life stories, but I came away feeling I still had only surface view.

Doidge does a great job of retelling the story of Nora, her family life, and the transformation from journalist to writer to director. She recounts each of her career moves and movies with observations from those in her inner circle, and previously published quotes from Nora herself. I learned about her parents, both alcoholics who worked as playwrights and screen writers in Hollywood. In particular her complicated relationship with her mother, Phoebe Ephron, who was a legend in her own right. I learned about her three husbands, and the family dynamics between Nora and her sister, Delia. And I learned about her role as a feminist and friend, her warm side and also the prickly, honest side of her that sometimes got her into conflicts with others.

However the chapters were mostly a chronology of each of her movies and the circle of people involved in making them. There were a lot of names of people who, maybe meant more to those in Nora's generation, but to me it got tedious after awhile. The thought, who cares, kept creeping up.

I don't want to discredit the work Doidge obviously put into this book. It was thorough and well-written. I just felt that, either due to age or the disconnection to the biography genre, this was one I wasn't sorry to finish. I would recommend it to fans of Nora's work, maybe in their sixties or seventies, who are familiar with the names, films and social complexities of the time.

Thank you to Goodreads and Chicago Review Press for the free copy of this book.