Posted on by Ann@BooksontheTable

Those Amazing Ephron Sisters — Part I (Delia)

9780399166556HFour sisters, brought up in Hollywood by  famous screenwriter parents, all grow up to be successful writers. Sounds like a novel or movie script, doesn’t it? In fact, the youngest Ephron daughter, Amy, was named after the youngest March daughter in Little Women. In an Oprah magazine article, Hallie Ephron says:

As we got older, we grew comfortable in roles that met our parents’ expectations. Nora was the smart one. Delia, the comedian. I was the pretty, obedient one. And Amy was the adventurous mischief-maker. But in reality, we were more alike than we were different—all bossy and opinionated, witty and articulate, like our mother. At dinner, a three-course event that anchored every evening at 6:30 sharp, the competition for airtime was Darwinian.

This morning, I listened to Terry Gross interview Delia Ephron about her collection of autobiographical essays, Sister Mother Husband Dog. In the interview, Delia described the Ephron dinner table. Her father would shout, “That’s a great line — write it down!” whenever one of his daughters said anything clever or amusing. The four girls were groomed to be writers from an early age. Nora, the eldest, was an early success — “published when she was born”, according to Delia. The other three were relatively late bloomers. Delia published an essay, “How to Eat Like a Child”, in the New York Times when she was 32, and her writing career took off from there, including  over a dozen books and numerous plays and screenplays. Many of the scripts were co-written with Nora. Amy began writing in her late thirties, and Hallie got started when she was close to 50.

Delia covers a lot of territory in Sister Mother Husband Dog. The first essay, “Losing Nora”, made me cry . . . and made me deeply grateful for my own sister. (And it also made me grateful that I was fortunate enough to see Nora’s last play, Lucky Guy, last year on Broadway.) My favorite essay is called “Bakeries”, and of course, it’s about bakeries — but also about “having it all”. You’ll have to read the whole essay to see how Delia gracefully segues from bakeries to the concept of “having it all”, but here’s one of my favorite passages:

To me, having it all — if one wants to define it at all — is the magical time when what you want and what you have match up . . . It might be a fleeting moment — drinking a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning when the light is especially bright. It might also be a few undisturbed hours with a novel I’m in love with, a three-hour lunch with my best friend, reading Goodnight Moon to a child, watching a Nadal-Federer match.

Delia has a wicked sense of humor — honed, she says, at that Ephron family dinner table. She says, “That’s where I learned how to tell a story and that I was funny.” Her thoughts on her  wayward hair, the banks taking over her neighborhood,  Twitter/modern technology, the “name-jacking” of her website, and Anthony Weiner made me laugh out loud. Weiner, she tells us, “could not have it all”.

Sister Mother Husband Dog starts with an essay about Nora’s death and ends with “Collaboration”, about the scripts Nora and Delia worked on together.  I loved reading about their writing process and about the inner workings of the movie business. One of their most successful projects was the screenplay for You’ve Got Mail, one of my favorite movies. Delia says that screenplay was “an especially good collaboration”; they chose to set it in the world of books because “we both loved books, had grown up in a house were books were worshipped”.  When I finished reading “Collaboration”, I wanted MORE — more of Delia Ephron’s wisdom, insight, and humor.

In the Fresh Air interview, Terry asked Delia how Nora’s premature death affected Delia’s feelings about getting older, pointing out that one of Nora’s best-known works is her collection of essays about women and aging, I Feel Bad About My Neck. Delia’s poignant response was, “I do feel that I have to do everything quickly. I don’t want to waste a day”.

Read Hallie Ephron’s thoughts on growing up with three talented sisters here:  http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Nora-Ephrons-Mother-Hallie-Ephron-Essay/3#ixzz2n0AJevCV

Advertisement
Posted on by Ann@BooksontheTable

Early Decision — Book Review

9780062240699The clock is ticking for thousands of privileged high school seniors — the early decision deadlines at top colleges are looming. Lacy Crawford’s roman à clef, Early Decision: Based on a True Frenzy, is a glimpse into the world of an independent college counselor and her clients. The main character in Early Decision is Anne, a 27-year-old Chicagoan with degrees from Princeton and the University of Chicago who’s not quite sure what she wants to do with her life. She stumbles upon a career as a “college whisperer”  to students from wealthy families in Chicago and the North Shore. To the mothers, she’s a shoulder to lean on; to the fathers, she’s a voice of reason; and to the stressed-out teenagers, she’s a buffer between them and their anxious parents. But she wonders why:

. . . she was dating a man who cheated like mad and helping high school kids with their college applications .  . Every year, in late December as the application deadlines were bearing down, Anne swore she would never do it again. And then come spring, the phone calls came.

What I enjoyed most about Early Decision wasn’t the insider’s look at college admissions.  There have been several recent novels on that topic — most notably, Admission, by Jean Hanff Korelitz (made into a terrific movie starring Tina Fey) — as well as a spate of nonfiction accounts. Readers seem to have an endless appetite for information about the mysterious world of college admissions. I am no different — although, having weathered my three children’s college applications, I am growing a little tired of the whole subject. But I think  Early Decision is about much more than college — it’s about what it means to become an independent adult, and what it means to raise productive citizens. What decisions should parents make for children? How do we teach our children to make decisions for themselves? How can young adults gain self-knowledge and take control of their own futures? Anne, as well as her students, is struggling to make a life for herself:

Here is what was going to happen: Anne was going to wake up one morning in full possession of the authority she needed to go out and start her life. To acquire the position she really wanted — whatever that was — and succeed. . . She did not know how to explain why it hadn’t happened yet. She had been careful and diligent. She’d earned terrific grades. There had been classes in college about which she was passionate, and books she underlined so hard she tore the page . . . Her professors loved her, but none of them shared with her the knowledge she needed: How did such work lead to a life full of days? What, exactly, did one do?

Like her protagonist, Lacy Crawford was a private college admissions counselor.  As a high school English teacher, she discovered a talent for helping students with their personal essays for college. Parents began asking her to help their children with the admissions process, and a successful, 15-year career was born. When asked in an interview with The Atlantic why she didn’t write a tell-all memoir, Lacy said:

I have no interest in hurting people who have already been hurt by their parents’ ambition. These are stories of real devastation. And I was able to shine a spotlight on things with fiction that I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise . . . I also didn’t want to write a memoir. I don’t have to relive my 20s. It wasn’t that fun the first time.

But reading Early Decision is fun — the humor is satirical without being mean-spirited, the writing is clever and fluid, the main characters are interesting and three-dimensional, and the ending is very satisfying.  Without giving too much away, I can tell you that nearly everyone makes the right decision. There’s an epilogue with updates on the five students that the book follows (four are wealthy, one is the daughter of a maid), as well as on the other characters — including April, Anne’s obnoxious neighbor. If you like ends tied up neatly in a book, this one is for you.

The literal French translation of roman à clef is “novel with a key”. The term originates from 17th century France when it was common for novelists to portray political and public figures masked as fictional characters. There might have been an actual key in the form of epigraphs. Today, the term is used a little more broadly, to describe a book about real events or people, with details obscured. (My favorite roman á clef of all time: Nora Ephron’s Heartburn.)