Growing up in Beverly Hills with screenwriter parents, and vying with three younger sisters for their attention, Nora Ephron discovered the way to her parents’ hearts “was to make them laugh.”
In her mother’s head, “everything is copy, all of life is material, write what you know. It was the soundtrack in our house, so what was the choice, really?” she said during a phone interview from her Manhattan home.
“If you wanted your parents to love you, you tried to do what they wanted you to do.”
Not coincidentally, all four Ephron daughters became writers, and Nora, now 69, continues to turn her life into material. Her latest book, “I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections,” follows “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” her 2006 book about growing older. She will discuss both books Nov. 21 at a Commonwealth Club of Silicon Valley event at the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto.
Phoebe Ephron, her mother, “taught us to be survivors,” to find the funny detail even in the darkest times, Ephron said. “I think she was teaching us something that’s very much the basis of Jewish humor. If you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But if you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, that’s your joke.”
There’s nothing funny about divorce, and Ephron, married for 20 years to writer Nicholas Pileggi, has survived two of them. Her second divorce, from Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, became fodder for “Heartburn,” her novel subsequently made into a movie.
As she tells it, she was pregnant with their second son and about to fly back from New York to Washington, when a writer-producer handed her a script to read on the plane about a sophisticated couple who attend a dinner party replete with glittering conversation. On page 8, breaking the silence of their ride home, the woman confronts her husband and says, “All right. Who is she?”
At that moment, Ephron writes, “I closed the script. I couldn’t breathe. I knew at that moment my husband was having an affair.”
How did she know? “I can’t explain it,” she said. “It was just a coin dropping and suddenly everything suddenly made sense.” Back at home, she found the key to a locked drawer, and found the evidence.
But she survived. “My religion is Get Over It,” she writes. “I turned it into a rollicking story. I wrote a novel. I bought a house with the money from the novel.”
Although the title of her book is “I Remember Nothing” — names of films, book titles, people she’s met — Ephron remembers a great deal. Speaking of divorce, she writes, “I remember the pain. What you really forget is love.”
“It’s one of the saddest things about divorce,” she said, reflecting on “the fun of hearing of how my parents fell in love and got married. It was the kind of romance of our childhood, the courtship of our parents. You get divorced and your kids never hear that, in part because you barely remember, in part because it’s so covered over with aggravation.”
Although Ephron writes glowingly of her childhood in Beverly Hills, surrounded by transplanted New Yorkers in the film industry and enjoying wonderful meals in her family dining room, things took a turn for the worse when she was 15. Almost overnight, she writes, her mother became an alcoholic and would fly out of her bedroom at midnight in screaming fits. Her father, Henry, was also an alcoholic, although “somehow his alcoholism was more benign,” she writes.
What Ephron did get from her mother — who actually had a cook — was a love of food “that veers on the pathological.” Ephron sprinkles her novels and essays with recipes, and food plays a prominent role in some of her screenplays, including “Heartburn” and 2009’s “Julie and Julia,” a film she also directed.
When she was about 16, her mother put her in charge of shopping for food and planning all the menus, and that set the stage for Ephron’s obsession. “I think about food almost all the time,” says Ephron, who nonetheless is thin. “I’m careful about what I eat. If I ate at home every night, I would probably be fat because I’m a good cook and I like my cooking.”
Her Jewish identity, she said, is more related to gastronomy than ritual. At the end of her book, she has a list of things she won’t miss in her infirmity or after death. It includes bar mitzvahs and bad dinners. What she will miss is bacon, butter, Thanksgiving dinner and the Christmas tree.
“I’m a kind of cultural, chopped-liver-eating, unreligious Jew,” Ephron said. “Obviously, I’m a Jew and I feel Jewish in that sort of Upper West Side New York way, culturally. But I have no observance.”
“I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections” by Nora Ephron (137 pages, Knopf, $22.95)
Nora Ephron will discuss “I Remember Nothing” and “I Feel Bad About My Neck” at 2 p.m. Nov. 21 during a Commonwealth Club of Silicon Valley event at the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto. Tickets: $12 and $20. Reservations: (800) 847-7730 or www.commonwealthclub.org/sv.