Author of the week: Nora Ephron

last updated 8 January 2015

Nora Ephron has been thinking a lot about death lately, said Kerry Lauerman in Salon.com. Though a healthy 69, Ephron devoted much of her newest book of essays, entitled I Remember Nothing, to tackling— in typical trenchant fashion—the subject of mortality. In one chapter, she makes a detailed list of things she’ll miss when she’s dead. “There’s nothing wrong with knowing what you’re going to miss beforehand so you can have quite a lot of it before it’s over,” says the author, who lists among her favorite things a hot dog from the Los Angeles delicatessen Nate ’n Al’s. Ephron wants the frank to be her last meal. “They’re garlicky, but not too garlicky,” she says, “and they FedEx.”

Death and hot dogs aren’t the only things occupying Ephron these days, said Jeremy Peters in The New York Times. She’s also been thinking a lot about divorce. Recently, she helped launch a section of The Huffington Post dedicated to the subject of marital splits. “My theory is that marriages come and go, but divorces are forever,” says the sometime screenwriter, who once documented, in the semiautobiographical novel and film Heartburn, the tense atmosphere of her doomed marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein. Ephron claims that HuffPost Divorce is sure to be a hit—given the enormous popularity of bridal magazines. If you can “make an entire industry” out of people who are interested in marriage for just a year, she says, “imagine what you can do with people who are divorced for life.”