My boyfriend and I have a long-standing competition known as “Do you know who died?”
In essence, when a well-known person passes on, one of us will ask the other: “Do you know who died?” Whoever knew about the death first is, well, the “winner.”
I don’t often sentimentalize over celebrities, and so in all the years we’ve tracked losses of brilliant people, I think I’ve only felt genuinely sad at two losses: George Carlin, in 2008, and Nora Ephron earlier this week.
While I cannot pretend to be an expert in all things Ephron — I never read “I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections,” never saw “Love and Loss and What I Wore,” never (sorry) watched “Silkwood,” I still look to her as a writer who had an effect on my life. She wasn’t the type of writer or filmmaker who made it necessary to see the gamut of her work to understand her effect.
Ephron has been called a feminist, but she never — so far as I saw — fell into the trap of equating so-called feminism with anti-male sentiments, looking at men as the enemy rather than seeking them as allies. She championed women but didn’t do so angrily.