Nora Ephron who died this week was a groundbreaking filmmaker with films like When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless In Seattle, Julie and Julia and many other of the most memorable romantic comedies in recent history here in an interview with NPRs Neal Conan she describes how hard it is to get used to getting older.

ILLUSTRATION: EDWARD SOREL

I don’t know how many times we have seen  When Harry Met Sally , You’ve Got Mail and  Sleepless In Seattle. They are immortal!

In the very interesting documentary  Dreams on Spec by Daniel Snyder she is one of the people mentoring three aspiring Hollywood screenwriters who pour their hearts into their scripts, pitch their ideas to anyone who will listen and work at other day-jobs in the hopes of one day seeing one of their scrpits made into a movie.

That Nora Ephron’s  collection of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck and And Other Reflections on Being a Woman, was on the number one on the The New York Times Best Seller list in 2006 might be less known to people who only knew her as a filmmaker. The Guardian praises Ephron and agrees with The Washington Post in that her “essays are readable three decades on – she can eviscerate and self-deprecate, but her humour always wins out”.

The New Yorker’s Culture desk remembers Ephron by collecting some of her  pieces and National Public Radio has collected some of their stories about and with Ephron.

In a blog in the New York Times John Williams writes that her most-often-quoted line might be from her screenplay for When Harry Met Sally: “I’ll have what she’s having” uttered by Harry (Billy Crystal) in the film.

Ephron has said that she new early on the identity of Deep Throat and that she told anyone who asked. “I would give speeches to 500 people and someone would say, “Do you know who Deep Throat is?” And I would say, “It’s Mark Felt.”

Meryl Streep remembers Ephron: “Nora was a person whose gifts of mind, amply displayed as a young person in her sharply observed journalistic pieces and in her personal wit, were, when I first met her, kind of scary: aimed and airy at the same time, an insouciant sharpness that could be intimidating, because you could never catch her ‘trying’, everything seemed effortless. But as I got to know her, I understood what drove her was her acute curiosity, and her desire to observe and find out stuff. It’s what made her great as a journalist, and as a director, too.”