"To which you go, are you nuts?" Her eyes widen in mock amazement.
At 65 she was sick of reading about how life post-menopause is one long party, how the appropriate response to getting older is unalloyed joy and - the orthodoxy that irritates her most - how she should currently be having the best sex of her life. The new book is a collection of essays about ageing that takes on, with characteristic brio, what Ephron considers to be the medicated smiliness of most volumes on the subject. Heartburn, the fictionalised account of her then husband Carl Bernstein's infidelity with Margaret Jay, traumatised a generation of Washington men so profoundly that a male writer at the Washington Post said to me only recently: "You know, you really don't want Nora Ephron calling you a jerk in one of her books, because" - and here he lowered his voice to an agonised whisper - "people are going to read it." I Feel Bad About My Neck is her first book in 23 years and people are still talking about the last one. But there remains about Ephron the air of the hack that is, of someone standing off to one side, alive to the absurdity of it all and with slightly messy hair. Over the past four decades she has been nominated three times for an Oscar, written five bestselling books and directed John Travolta, Nicole Kidman and Tom Hanks, among others. It was her first writing job out of college and - this was the Post in its pre-Murdoch days - it provided a sort of grungy foundation for the rest of her career. B efore she became a magazine writer, and long before she was a screenwriter and a Hollywood film director, Nora Ephron did five years hard labour as a reporter on the New York Post.
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