Word: ephron
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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JUDGING FROM the experiences of the 28 celebrities who were interviewed for The First Time, relief and disappointment are not uncommon reactions. "My God, is this it?" Nora Ephron thought to herself after losing her virginity in a Harvard dormitory. "Is this what I've been going through all this torment about?" And Clifford Irving's first thought after his first time was, "That was lousy. I've got to fuck someone else." Perhaps it's just one of the facts of life that sexual initiation is a drag. Nevertheless, the subject continues to hold a certain fascination, whose power...
...press watchers think the newsmagazines and their covers deserved such censure. "Politicians might do better to figure out why our society causes people to act this way than to blame the newsmagazines," says Esquire Media Columnist Nora Ephron. "Even if you could prove that Sara Moore was looking at TIME or Newsweek as she loaded her gun, you'd still have to support a free press." Says Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee: "Journalists are in the business of describing what happens and we don't lie, which is more than a lot of politicians can say. The fearful...
When Gloria Steinem turns to her at the Democratic Convention, tears of frustration rolling down her cheeks, all Ephron can think is, "I have never cried over anything remotely political in my life, and I honestly have no idea of what to say." Here Ephron is obviously trying to underline the difference between herself and Steinem, between two individual women who both consider them selves part of the movement. But her underlining is gratuitous; what we're interested in at the moment is what's going on in Steinem's mind, not in Ephron...
...When Ephron focuses on women who are really vastly different from herself, her presence sometimes becomes not just gratuitous, but annoying. And those are just the sort of women that she seems to enjoy writing about most--Bernice Gera, first lady umpire; the housewives whose biggest thrill in life is participating in the Pillsbury Bake-Off. The condescension, even mockery, is almost unavoidable. Even when you suspect she's right on target--when she says that Pat Loud "has made a fool of herself on television, and now she is that Jan Morris has become not a woman...
...Ephron doesn't let you draw back--she writes from the assumption that you're on her side, that you share her point of view. It's a flattering assumption, and the temptation is to play along. But if you decide at some point that you want nothing to do with it, you're more or less stuck--it's the flip side of that old bond she set up, just as Ephron's harshness about others is the flip side of her honesty about herself. Perhaps that is the worst thing about Ephron's method of personal journalism...