Nora Ephron and Me

In this deeply intimate and original biography, Hadley Freeman traces the life and lasting influence of Nora Ephron, one of the most beloved and culturally significant women of the twentieth century.

Nora Ephron is everywhere. She's quoted in television shows and Oscar ceremonies, name-dropped in divorce memoirs, and invoked by generations of women seeking advice on how to live. More than a decade after her death, she remains the lighthouse: the voice who told us what table to buy, how to survive heartbreak and what it meant to be the heroine of your own life.

Everything Is Nora is the biography Nora deserves: funny, sharp, honest and thoroughly researched. Hadley Freeman draws on original interviews with Nick Pileggi, Rob Reiner, Meg Ryan, Joan Didion's family, Calvin Trillin and many others, as well as unpublished letters, script drafts and archival material, to examine how a Jewish girl from Beverly Hills – the daughter of two brilliant but troubled screenwriters – became the defining female voice of late twentieth-century America as a journalist, filmmaker, novelist and memoirist.

This is the story of where heroines come from. It is also about how one woman still shows the rest of us, imperfectly and gratefully, how to live.

About the author

Hadley Freeman is a staff writer at the Sunday Times. She worked for more than 20 years at the Guardian and her writing has appeared in many publications. Her previous book, House of Glass, was a Sunday Times bestseller and has been published around the world.