Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

Nora Ephron, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director and longtime journalist/essayist, passed away in Manhattan last night at the age of 71. Ephron’s career was vast and had much to offer in the way of teaching. She was beloved for her romantic comedies as much as her own brand of feminism, which included no shortage of realist sexiness. Here are some of my favorite lessons the impressively quirky and courageous Ephron had to offer:

1. “Take it personally”

In a 1996 speech to the graduating class of Wellesley College, her alma mater, Ephron urged the women to take every perceived attack on their gender personally. “There’s still a glass ceiling,” she said. “Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally, but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally.” Ephron urged against the kind of passivity and naivete that allow us to see public instances of marginalization as occurring inside a vacuum.

2. You’re only a couple hours a week away from being a homeless person (appearance-wise)

In I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being a Woman, Ephron writes in the essay “On Maintenance” about the fragility of being human, the thin, superficial line between being put-together and falling apart: “…the other day, on the street, I passed a homeless woman. I have never understood the feminists who insisted they were terrified of becoming bag ladies, but as I watched this woman shuffle down the street, I finally understood at least my version of it….I am only about eight hours a week away from looking exactly like that woman on the street—with frizzled flyaway gray hair I would probably have if I stopped dyeing mine.”   

3. You can write sappy romantic comedies and still influence national politics…maybe

Ephron claimed she figured out who Deep Throat was while married to Carl Bernstein (half of the team responsible for breaking Watergate), though he did not tell her. She alleged in the Huffington Post in 2005 she figured out his identity on her own and for years told everyone she knew. Apparently Mark Felt himself had begun revealing his identity as Deep Throat though, as with Ephron, no one took him seriously. Whether no one listened because Ephron was, well, Ephron, we’ll never know.

4. “Secret to Life, Marry an Italian.”

This was Ephron’s six word biography in Larry Smith’s Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. Ephron was married to screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi for over twenty years. It speaks to Ephron’s sense of wit when asked to sum up her life in six words, she steered clear of the preachy or esoteric.

5. Get Over It

The advice may seem trite, but in Ephron’s essays this conclusion is more or less a consistent theme. In a 2010 column on divorce for the Huffington Post, Ephron writes: “People are careless and there are almost never any consequences.” Of her two painful divorces, she writes: “I survived. My religion is Get Over It. I turned it into a rollicking story. I wrote a novel. I bought a house with the money from the novel.” She explains the “most important thing” about you at any given time seems it will last forever, but whether it’s being a divorcee or simply getting old, the “most important thing” always changes. And of course it’s always relative too—in “I Remember Nothing,” she writes: “I am old. I am sixty-nine years old. I’m not really old, of course. Really old is eighty. But if you are young, you would definitely think that I’m old.”

6. It’s okay to be a bad secret-keeper, if you’re whimsical about it

By 2006 Ephron was a renowned screenwriter after an early career in journalism. She still, admittedly, had a very difficult time keeping juicy secrets (of which she had a lot). While on a trip to Las Vegas, Ephron witnessed hotel tycoon Steve Wynn put his elbow through a $139 million Picasso. Everyone present agreed to keep the incident a secret, which Ephron wrote in the Huffington Post in 2006 was “the most painful experience of [her] life.” (If the case of Deep Throat is not evidence enough.) She kept the secret for nine days. Ephron may have changed her career four times and been a champion of the relativity of all things in life, but she also showed us some things—like a penchant for sharing delectable gossip— never change.

7. “Be the heroine of your life, not the victim”

The advice, also from Ephron’s graduation speech to Wellesley College, reflected her own trajectory as a woman breaking down barriers in her industry, spanning across four different careers. Ephron was widely considered one of the most successful female writers in Hollywood. Rather than allow herself to be defined by the tragedies which befell her, she made them humorous fodder instead. Ephron advised the graduating class if things did not turn out how they wanted, they had no one to blame but themselves.

—Alissa Fleck

It’s that line, delivered by Marie (Carrie Fisher) to Jess (Bruno Kirby), after learning that their mutual best friends Harry and Sally (yes, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan) have switched up their friendship from platonic to “it’s complicated,” that makes Nora Ephron’s screenplay for When Harry Met Sally a work for the ages. (Yes, even more than that orgasm scene in Katz’s.) How a movie could be so light, so funny, so modern, could also manage to be so deftly universal and heart-piercing is the grand achievement of Ephron’s quite checkered career.

Very sadly, this career came to an end last night as Ephron lost a private battle with acute myeloid leukemia. But over the course of four decades, Ephron, an Upper West Side Jew raised in Hollywood by a team of play- and screenwriting parents, married the lightning-quick wit of Joan Rivers and the career ambition of Barbra Streisand in order to give birth to one of the most impressive – and sure to be emulated – lives a storyteller has ever enjoyed.

Harry garnered Ephron a solo Oscar nomination, though she already had shared a nod with Alice Arlen for adapting Silkwood (her first outing with Meryl Streep) and would later share another nomination with Jeff Arch and David S. Ward for Sleepless in Seattle, her second at-bat as director and first monster hit. Though she came from a prominent background that opened many doors to her, Ephron’s career history demonstrates an eager and talented employee who made sure to fill whatever room she was in, first as a mail at Newsweek and later as a writer for the New York Post, Esquire and New York (a magazine that would continue to extol and interview her as recently as this past year).

Her attention to detail and human folly characterized her work, and it’s those nuances permeating her work in all genres, both non-fiction and fictional, that elevated her humorous observations to something more prescient and evergreen. Working on an ultimately dismissed version of a script for All the President’s Men with then-husband, Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, helped open even more doors for the writer in Hollywood in the mid-1970s. (It was the second marriage for Ephron; a third, to GoodFellas co-writer Nicholas Pileggi lasted until her death.)

Ephron was also, famously, willing to divulge her own personal hurts and humiliations, as she did in Heartburn, loosely translating her marriage to, betrayal by, and divorce from Bernstein. (The two had two sons together, Jacob and Max.) Streep and Jack Nicholson played the Ephron and Bernstein surrogates.

The most celebrated directors and actors clamored to work with Ephron over the years – Tom Hanks, Diane Keaton, Nicole Kidman, Mike Nichols, John Travolta. 2009’s Julie & Julia also helped turn the page in Streep’s own career, providing the opportunity to plum deep in a comedic but respectful look at chef Julia Child. Though her directorial debut, This Is My Life, showed some of the under-nourished signs of a fledgling director, it signaled one of Ephron’s signature storytelling motifs that would continue through other films like Mixed Nuts, You’ve Got Mail, Bewitched: strong women.

The dominant theme of the movies in which Ephron had a voice is that they feature women on equal emotional, professional, and romantic footing with their male counterparts. In Life, Dottie (Julie Kavner), is a single mother and struggling stand-up comic who suddenly finds success. Annie, the Ryan character in Sleepless, is a Baltimore journalist; Kathleen, the Ryan role in Mail, runs a family bookstore on the Upper West Side. She believes in the joy of reading and opposes the corporate monoliths out to destroy the charms of smaller stores. Though many (not all, however) of her female leads ended up with the guy, they remain defined by their own interests and experiences. The man need not complete her; he merely complements her.

Ephron had, typically, showed few signs of slowing down. A Broadway production of Lucky Guy, a new play late columnist Mike McAlary, is targeted for a Broadway opening in early 2013 and would mark Hanks’ Main Stem debut. But her crowning achievement will always be, for me, Harry, a film I have seen over two hundred times since it opened nearly 23 years ago. For all the classics like Casablanca and Gone With the Wind, and record-breaking moneymakers like Avatar and The Avengers, Harry is, by leaps and bounds, the single movie mentioned more than any other as a personal favorite in my conversations with people about movies they love. Why? Because of how Ephron tapped into its cross-generational appeal. She knew that a movie about love, insecurity, good food and real estate could reach just about anyone.

Ephron’s career and legacy are impressive enough to make even the most fulfilled and self-assured recite that other, oft-quoted line from Harry: “I’ll have what she’s having.”