Nora Ephron: The heroine of her life, not the victim In a 1972 essay for Esquire on the agonies of being flat-chested - one of a series of funny, personal pieces with which she made her name - Ephron described her mother's bracing approach to pubescence: " 'I want to buy a bra," I said to my mother one night. What for?" she said. My mother was really hateful about bras... 'Why not use a Band-Aid instead?" " The resilience acquired from her upbringing served Ephron well, both as a young reporter in the male-dominated world of Sixties and early Seventies journalism and, later, as a Hollywood screenwriter and director; Hollywood, she remarked, "had never been very interested in making movies by or about women." But it was the disintegration of her second marriage, to the investigative reporter Carl Bernstein, who broke the news of Watergate, that really tested her resilience. In the introduction to a new edition of Heartburn, her autobiographical novel about the break-up, Ephron wrote: "I left out a lot of what happened, but I never get credit for this, especially from my second husband, who ought to be grateful that I did. Everyone always asks, 'Was he mad at you for writing the book? And I have to say, 'Yes. Yes he was. He still is. It is one of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it! Her book, Ephron writes, "is often referred to as a thinly disguised novel. I have no real quarrel with this description, even though I've noticed that the words 'thinly disguised" are applied mostly to books written by women... Philip Roth and John Updike picked away at the carcasses of their early marriages in book after book, but... they were never hit with the thinly disguised thing." The thinly disguised events that led to the writing of Ephron's first novel were her husband's affair with Margaret Jay, now Baroness Jay of Paddington and a former Leader of the House of Lords, then the wife of Peter Jay, the British Ambassador to the US from 1976 to 1979. Ephron was seven months pregnant with her second child when she discovered Bernstein's affair with Jay. In her novel, racily written in an urbane version of the dotty stream-of-consciousness style pioneered by Anita Loos's Lorelei Lee, the heroine of Gentleman Prefer Blondes, her shock (she delivered the baby she was carrying early) is briskly transmuted into tabasco-spiked high comedy. The bits everyone remembers are the snappy one-liners - the description of the faithless husband, "Mark," as a man who would have sex with a Venetian blind, and of his lover, the preposterously named Thelma Rice, as "a person who was not only a giant but a clever giant," and who moreover makes "gluey puddings" (Ephron's heroine, Rachel Samstat, is a food writer, and a notably good cook). But what makes Heartburn a great novel - rather than simply a great revenge novel - are the instances of grievous pain spun into comedy. Rachel discovers her husband's affair when she reads a loving inscription Thelma has written on a book of children's songs intended for Mark and Rachel's son, Sam. She has an agonisingly funny conversation with Thelma's husband, Jonathan, about the couches with which Thelma and Mark intended to furnish their love nest - Thelma favoured green, while Mark preferred brown tweed, they almost compromised on yellow, but Thelma thought it would show the dirt - before realising that, somehow, Jonathan blames her for the fact that their spouses are having an affair. As the newly single parent of two sons, Ephron wrote her novel in tandem with screenplays, paying the bills and buying time to write fiction with the well-paid film work. Heartburn was a bestseller. Ephron wrote a screen adaptation that starred Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, and went on to become a successful screenwriter and director, establishing herself as a cultural weather-maker with movies such as Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and, latterly, Julie and Julia. "One of the best things about directing movies, as opposed to merely writing them," she said, "is that there's no confusion about who's to blame: you are." This maxim informed not just her movie-making career, but her life. Ephron grew up at a time when women - even very clever ones - were educated to be compliant. She savaged her university, the single-sex Wellesley College, for turning out a generation of docile, unadventurous women. And she criticised the astounding sexism she encountered in her journalistic career and, later, in Hollywood. But Ephron's gift was less for polemic than for a sometimes awkward clear-sightedness. She could never resist taking her own line, which got her into trouble with feminists: "I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women's movement didn't realise how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying, 'Don't you see how oppressed you are,"" she told Newsday in 1976. But her stubborn idiosyncrasy ripened into a sharp-edged wisdom. Other women writers who have chronicled catastrophic life events - Elizabeth Smart on lost love, Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates on bereavement - have found themselves identified with those crises, their other work effaced or diminished by a single, defining emotional convulsion. Ephron adroitly avoided that trap. She wrote herself a route out of her marital betrayal that led to success and fame, but she never became synonymous with that part of her life. On the contrary, she continued to notice and record the tricky business of how to grow up, and grow older, with grace. "Ephron," a journalist once wrote rather disapprovingly, "has built a career out of spilling secrets." But what useful secrets they were - not just the identity of Woodward and Bernstein's Deep Throat (which Ephron claimed to have been telling everyone who would listen for decades before Mark Felt finally outed himself), but the recipe for a really good key lime pie to hurl at your cheating husband, the therapeutic effect of a good haircut - "cheaper by far than a trip to the psychiatrist, and far more uplifting" - and how to deal with age-related regret: consider the hummingbirds, how busy they are getting the best out of life. "Above all," said Ephron, in an address to the graduates of Wellesley in 1996, "be the heroine of your life, not the victim." She did it herself, and with her journalism, her fiction, her films and her funny, courageous essays, she taught a generation of women young enough to be her daughters how to do it, too.