Her mother, a Broadway playwright and Hollywood screenwriter, imbued Ms. Ephron with a razor-sharp self-awareness and the ambition to transform workaday absurdities, cultural idiosyncracies, romantic foibles and even marital calamity into essays, novels and films brimming with invitingly mordant wit. She credited her mother with bestowing “this kind of terrific ability, not to avoid pain but to turn it over and recycle it as soon as possible.
Full story: Nora Ephron, prolific author and screenwriter, dies at age 71