She dropped the name of my ex-husband [former Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein]. GANAHL: So really, as great a life as you’ve had, it may actually be greater than you know. EPHRON: It may be even more fabulous. GANAHL: Is this a memory thing, or is it that as you get older, you discover that you really don’t have to know everything? EPHRON: You might have to know more than we know. There are certain things that I’m just refusing to know certain things about in the hopes that they will go away. You know, where it’s like, “Where is this country? Do I have to learn who its leaders are?” I might just stop. That’s how I feel about the Kardashians and Glenn Beck. GANAHL: Why do you think young people care about popular culture more than we do at this age? Why is it more important to the young to be on top of all this? EPHRON: I think we were like that. I have friends who can sing the themes to every television show from the ’60s and the ’70s, when fortunately I was too old to watch any of them. But I can certainly do the entire repertoire of all the people who were singing when I was growing up in the ’50s. I know every standard. When I came to New York, there were things you had to do in order to be a citizen of the metropolis. You had to read Catch-22 and you had to have your copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, or you couldn’t be in the conversation. GANAHL: You also say something similar about staying technologically current. I love what you said about how Twitter was just invented to make us seem old. EPHRON: That’s how I really feel about it. I was on the cutting edge. When e–mail came, I was absolutely the seventh or eighth person to do it. I was on America Online so early that I got my own name on it without a four digit number after it. It was so divine in the beginning when you had seven or eight friends who were on e–mail, and when that voice said, “You’ve got mail,” your heart leapt. It was something that you were actually interested in reading. It wasn’t from the Democratic National Committee or the Williams-Sonoma people; it was mail. It wasn’t like, “You want lunch?” I wrote You’ve Got Mail and I directed it and I was a believer in e-mail and now I feel about it like how you feel about an ex-boyfriend,
like, what was the matter with me? GANAHL: It’s very rare in this day and age for writers to be famous. You’re a household name at this point. What would you say is the weirdest upshot of fame? Is it “Nora’s Meatloaf ” at the restaurant? EPHRON: That’s the nice part. GANAHL: Who would have thought they’d have a meatloaf named after them? EPHRON: I would have imagined that. We used to play a game called “What would you like named after you?” So I have given a lot of thought to it. I go to those delicatessens where they have sandwiches named after people, and I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have a sandwich named after you. So when I opened the menu of the Monkey Bar in New York and saw the words “Nora’s Meatloaf,” I was not surprised; I was thrilled. Even though it was not my meatloaf. I’ve never made meatloaf that way, but I had told the owner that he should make meatloaf, and he very sweetly named it after me. It was a fabulous experience, because then people went to the restaurant and wrote me e-mails saying, “Had your meatloaf last night and it was great.” And I did not say to them: “I had nothing to do with it; it is not my recipe.” I said, “Thank you! It is good, isn’t it?” I did hardly any work that day, because I felt I already had this meatloaf out there. GANAHL: Talk about what you called the institutional sexism you encountered at Newsweek. EPHRON: I just saw Diane Sawyer interview Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor at Maria Shriver’s fabulous party in Long Beach. They both graduated from law school and didn’t get a job offer. It wasn’t that long ago. I came to New York in 1962 determined to be a journalist, and I went to an employment agency on 32nd Street and said, “I want to be a journalist.” The lady said, “Do you want to work at Newsweek?” I said, “OK.” So she sent me to Newsweek, and they said, “Why do you want to work at Newsweek?” I didn’t want to work at Newsweek; I just wanted to be in journalism in some way. So I said, “Because I want to be a writer,” and the man interviewing me said, “Well, women aren’t writers at Newsweek.” It would never have crossed my mind to say that was a sexist remark, because we had not invented that word yet. That was the way
the world worked; we all knew that. It’s what Ginsburg and O’Connor said, that the world works in a certain way. Then there’s me. It wasn’t in a general sort of way where you get a bunch of women together and just sue, which is what happened at Newsweek. I just said, “I’ll go somewhere where maybe that’s not true.” But the thing that’s weird about it is that there was a women writing at Newsweek. She was hired during World War II, when they had to hire women because they ran out of guys, and they were never making that mistake again. So he said there were no women [writers] at Newsweek and totally ignored the fact that there was one. Back then, you were in a track, and I was in the girl track. I was a mail girl, and then I was a clipper, which meant I clipped newspapers and used my brilliant bachelor of art degree to know that a story about a cure for cancer should probably get to the medicine department. Then I became a researcher, it was called. The men would write the pieces and the women would make sure every word in them was correct. It was so institutionalized and yet it was the way the world was. Years later, when the lawsuit was filed at Newsweek and I was long gone, the editor at Newsweek told the Times, “We don’t have a policy here; it’s just the way we’ve always done it.” I got angry and wrote a letter to Katharine Graham, the head of The Washington Post, which owned Newsweek, and said, “I don’t know you, but I want you to know that that is not true. There was a policy and it was articulated and they knew it perfectly well.” GANAHL: Did you ever get angry at the time? EPHRON: No, because I was moving on. I got out of there. Weirdly enough, it was a pretty good job to have. I was six months out of college and I was a researcher in the Nation department. I was a political science major, I loved politics. That wasn’t a bad job to have six months out of college. Then, at that very moment, the 100-day newspaper strike began in New York. All the New York papers closed, all seven of them at the time. My friend Victor Navasky, who was an editor of a humor magazine, got $10,000 from Arthur Frommer to do parodies of the New York newspapers. All kinds of great people worked on it; Calvin Trillin worked on it and a bunch of other names you might recognize. It was one of
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