A writer of tart, acidic observation has been turned into an influencer: revered for her aesthetic, and for her arsenal of life-style tips. Since her death, a decade ago, at seventy-one, the romanticization of her work has swelled like a movie score. The great irony of Ephron’s afterlife, then, is how quickly she’s been reduced to sentimental lore. It’s only in pushing past lazy clichés that a love affair moves from theoretical to tangible, from something a girl believes to something a woman knows how to work with. And certainly don’t cling to a myth just because it’s lovely. If Ephron has a lasting legacy as a writer, a filmmaker, and a cultural icon, it’s this: she showed how we can fall in and out of love with people based solely on the words that they speak and write. To Ephron, close reading, even when it finds the subject sorely wanting, is the very foundation of romance. In its way, Ephron’s column is a love letter to Parker-albeit one dipped in vinegar, as so much of Ephron’s best work was. “Before one looked too hard at it,” Ephron wrote, “it was a lovely myth.” To make matters worse, once Ephron started reading deep into Parker’s work, she found much of it to be corny and maudlin and, to use Ephron’s withering words, “so embarrassing.” Reluctantly, she let her childhood hero go. Unfortunately, after Ephron moved to Manhattan, in 1962, she discovered that she was far from the only lady at the table to have a “Dorothy Parker problem.” Every woman with a typewriter and an inflated sense of confidence believed that she was going to be crowned the next Miss One-Liner.

All I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker. “I grew up on it and coveted it desperately. They crossed paths again when Ephron was twenty she remembered the meeting in crisp detail, describing Parker as “frail and tiny and twinkly.” But her encounters with the queen of the bon mot weren’t the point. Ephron first met Parker as a child, in her pajamas, at her screenwriter parents’ schmoozy Hollywood parties. Ephron was then thirty-two, and her subject was the particular clichéd ambition of becoming Dorothy Parker, a writer she had idolized in her youth.

“I have spent a great deal of my life discovering that my ambitions and fantasies-which I once thought of as totally unique-turn out to be clichés,” Nora Ephron wrote in 1973, in a column for Esquire.

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