Why everyone wants what Nora Ephron was having

I have come late to Nora Ephron — a little too late for her, anyway, as she died in 2012. Indeed, it was just after she breathed her last that I read her only novel, Heartburn, a copy of which had been pressed on me by a writer friend with a mad glint in her eye. It is that sort of book, and I now press copies on other friends with the same mad glint. A brutal dissection of Ephron’s disastrous marriage to the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, it’s also a brilliantly sustained piece of comic writing, as good as anything you’ll find outside Wodehouse. Nigella Lawson loves it, as well she might.

Why no other novels? Maybe Nora never again felt the need in quite the same way, or maybe she was too busy writing everything else. A prolific journalist in her youth, she moved on to screenplays with Silkwood, a screen version of Heartburn and, sublimely, When Harry Met Sally.