Why everyone wants what Nora Ephron was having

I have come late to Nora Ephron — a little too late for her, anyway, as she died in 2012. Indeed, it was just after she breathed her last that I read her only novel, Heartburn, a copy of which had been pressed on me by a writer friend with a mad glint in her eye. It is that sort of book, and I now press copies on other friends with the same mad glint. A brutal dissection of Ephron’s disastrous marriage to the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, it’s also a brilliantly sustained piece of comic writing, as good as anything you’ll find outside Wodehouse. Nigella Lawson loves it, as well she might.

Why no other novels? Maybe Nora never again felt the need in quite the same way, or maybe she was too busy writing everything else. A prolific journalist in her youth, she moved on to screenplays with Silkwood, a screen version of Heartburn and, sublimely, When Harry Met Sally. The vast profitability of the latter gave her the chance to direct her own scripts: Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, Julie & Julia. In her final years she returned to prose, with two glorious books of essays on ageing, both bestsellers. These were just the successes. As with any writer, the failures took up even more time.

The Most of Nora Ephron, then, is her posthumous greatest hits album, lovingly compiled by her longstanding editor Robert Gottlieb. There’s a dash of Heartburn here, the stream-of-consciousness plot splurge that opens the book; a scene or two from When Harry Met Sally; and a few of the best of the later essays. Unless you’re a Nora nerd, though, much of this material will be unfamiliar. There are good, robust, strikingly confident examples of her early journalism, the complete text of her late play Lucky Guy (produced on Broadway after her death), and a decent smattering of blogs for the Huffington Post.