"All her life, she subscribed to the belief that “everything is
copy,” a
phrase her mother, Phoebe, used to say. In fact, when
Phoebe was on her
deathbed, she told my mother, “Take notes.” She
did. What both of them believed was that writing has the power to
turn the bad things that happen to you into art (although “art” was
a word she hated). “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at
you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s
your laugh,” she wrote in her anthology “I Feel Bad About My Neck."
“So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.”
did. What both of them believed was that writing has the power to
turn the bad things that happen to you into art (although “art” was
a word she hated). “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at
you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s
your laugh,” she wrote in her anthology “I Feel Bad About My Neck."
“So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.”
From Nora Ephron's Final Act, By Jacob Bernstein
(The New York Times, March 6th 2013)