I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections

by Nora Ephron

I’d known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would be just an intermission. I’d spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I’d be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist. And I’d turned out to be right.

It was a heady time. Magazines like Esquire and New York were the zeitgeist, and the (mostly) men who wrote for them were cocky and full of beans. They thought they had invented nonfiction, which they hadn’t, and they even thought they had invented hanging out together in restaurants and staying up late.

I asked her about her son and I told her about mine. It’s my experience that no one but your very close friends is truly interested in your children, but we went on pretending for a while.

You can never know the truth of anyone’s marriage, including your own.

And I survived. My religion is Get Over It. I turned it into a rollicking story. I wrote a novel. I bought a house with the money from the novel. People always say that once it goes away, you forget the pain. It’s a cliché of childbirth: you forget the pain. I don’t happen to agree. I remember the pain. What you really forget is love.

The other night we were coming up the FDR Drive and Manhattan was doing its fabulous, magical, twinkling thing, and all I could think was how lucky I’ve been to spend my adult life in New York City.