Ode to Nora Ephron

Every Fall, I break out the Nora Ephron movies and bask in the perfection of the built-in bookshelves, tea cups, perfectly located, well-lit apartments and twinkle lights. I love the writing and casting too, but mostly, I want to move into her movie sets. And in my mind, we are girlfriends. She gives me advice and we lunch together like Kathleen Kelly and Birdie, having chicken salad sandwiches and tea.

Internet browsing on the subject led me to a 1996 graduation address she gave at Wellesley, her alma mater. The entire speech is wonderful. But this part speaks particularly to the theme of this blog. Enjoy:

"This is the season when a clutch of successful women -- who have it all -- give speeches to women like you and say, to be perfectly honest, you can't have it all. Maybe young women don't wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don't be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands.

And this is something else I want to tell you, one of the hundreds of things I didn't know when I was sitting here so many years ago: you are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever. We have a game we play when we're waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was your age, I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. Whatever those five things are for you today, they won't make the list in ten years -- not that you still won't be some of those things, but they won't be the five most important things about you.

Which is one of the most delicious things available to women, and more particularly to women than to men. I think. It's slightly easier for us to shift, to change our minds, to take another path. Yogi Berra, the former New York Yankee who made a specialty of saying things that were famously maladroit, quoted himself at a recent commencement speech he gave. "When you see a fork in the road," he said, "take it." Yes, it's supposed to be a joke, but as someone said in a movie I made, don't laugh this is my life, this is the life many women lead: two paths diverge in a wood, and we get to take them both. It's another of the nicest things about being women; we can do that.

Did I say it was hard? Yes, but let me say it again so that none of you can ever say the words, nobody said it was so hard. But it's also incredibly interesting. You are so lucky to have that life as an option."

Lucky, I am. I love that she says to embrace the mess and rejoice in the complications. This is particularly comforting coming from Nora because so much of what I like about her films is that everything has clean order, simplicity, and softness. In her films, the laundry and dishes are done. Everything is hung neatly in the closet so that the characters are free to watch a movie guilt-free or go to lunch with a friend. But it's more than just the housekeeping and decor. She creates seemingly close-knit familial communities in large cities where people who are not related love each other as though they were. And the greatest part is that the beautiful, picturesque, gentle community she creates seems just within our reach.

As parents, we stage our own films, introduce our children to the things that are most important to us and try to create an environment that feels safe and secure to them (or to us, or both). Part of what I've been striving for is to create a dreamlike place for my daughter to read books and paint and play and feel confident and supported by her community. It's nice to be reminded by girlfriend Nora, who in my mind creates the perfect kinds of those places (though fictional) that it's supposed to be difficult. It's up to me to sort through it all and find a new kind of peace for each new version of a (hopefully) evolving me.

For more Nora, she's blogging regularly now on The Huffington Post. Here's her link list.
Her most recent post, "It was you, Fredo," is spot on and so funny.