Every Thursday, I wake up and perform the same routine: I drive to
downtown Durham, NC, park and walk to the bakery for a coffee, then
cross the street and unlock the bookstore I work at. I crank Dusty
Springfield up, sweep the mats, straighten the display cases, and flip
the open sign around. Occasionally, someone will wander up and try to
come in, five minutes before open, at which point I can offer one of
those tiny retail mercies — outsized, and ultimately more rewarding for
me then them — and say, it’s fine, really, go ahead and come on in.
It’s a nice sequence, though it’s not lost on me that while doing my
job I’m also reenacting a scene, one I’ve secretly carried close since
high school. Few movies made it into my parents’ strict North Carolina
household, but You’ve Got Mail did, somehow, and the opening reel
played on loop in my head for years: Meg Ryan skipping down the steps,
buying her coffee, rolling up the gate to her bookstore. It’s autumn in
New York; the trees blaze with color and the Cranberries are playing.
The scene was adhesive not just because it was a prelude to romance, but
because it was a vision of adult life was that funny and smart and paid
attention.
Ephron cherished the use of routine in her movies, in much the same
way that she cherished the use of references — movies, books, songs — to
make us feel as if we’re pulled into a greater narrative, one at once
familiar and inevitable. Years after first watching the movie, I’d walk
through Washington Square Park, smack dab in the middle of a thrilling
autumn, as my friend SJ delivered an impassioned monologue about how
messed up it was for Joe Fox to actively deceive Kathleen Kelly through
an online avatar. (Now we have a set of unflattering romantic shorthands
— catfishing, ghosting, benching — not yet available to Ephron in the
’90s.) In theory, I probably agreed with SJ, but I was new to the city
and new to dating and not yet entirely deformed by cynicism. Mostly, I
was distracted by how much the argument itself seemed pulled from an
Ephron film: two friends (Ephron loved, and lingered, on the banter
between friends) walking through a park, tugging their coats closed and
arguing about love and narrative and the movies.
Somehow, You’ve Got Mail turns 20 this year. The landscape of
romance and the social mores and New York has all changed (Amazon now
representing a much less charming evil than 1998’s Fox Books), and my
own relationship with her writing has changed, too. I’m less sure than I
was, 10 years ago, about what she was trying to say. Still — I think
the language she offered up for love and revision is as relevant as
ever, and as happily easy to rip off. “Everything is copy,” Nora Ephron
liked to say in reference to her omnivorous approach to art.
Increasingly, I feel it’s just as true to say of the people who watch
her movies and feel the tug of longing, of wit, and of attention. ... [mehr] https://longreads.com/2018/12/18/the-world-of-nora-ephron-a-reading-list/
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