I'm guessing that quite a few of you enjoyed her movies and maybe some even read her writing, so this may be of interest.
The Nora Ephron We Forget
Since her death, Ephron has become a symbol of sappy romance. But her real subject was how words could bring people together—or drive them apart.
By Rachel Syme
Ephron’s films are highly literary—many of them are about reading and writing—and they suggest that language is at the heart of romance. The most obvious example is “You’ve Got Mail” (1998), in which Kathleen (Meg Ryan), a children’s-bookshop owner, falls in love with Joe (Tom Hanks), a corporate overlord opening a mega-bookstore that threatens her business. The two meet in an “Over Thirty” chat room and begin a lively anonymous correspondence, flinging taut observations at each other about their quirky experiences of the city... These notes are cozy and performative and a little dorky, the kind of thinky seduction that Ephron writes best. Of course, even in the golden age of AOL, few people wrote such e-mails. But this is Ephron’s version of movie magic: a world in which words are so important that you can fall for your enemy just because he knows how to use them... The idea of swooning over someone’s syntax so dramatically that you change your life appears again and again in Ephron’s work.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/22/the-nora-ephron-we-forget