I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections

by Nora Ephron

I went to stand in front of the White House the night Nixon resigned and here’s what I have to tell you about it: my wallet was stolen. I went to many legendary rock concerts and spent them wondering when they would end and where we would eat afterward and whether the restaurant would still be open and what I would order.

I was not at Woodstock, but I might as well have been because I wouldn’t remember it anyway. On some level, my life has been wasted on me. After all, if I can’t remember it, who can? The past is slipping away and the present is a constant affront. I can’t possibly keep up.

Now I know that there’s no such thing as the truth. That people are constantly misquoted. That news organizations are full of conspiracy (and that, in any case, ineptness is a kind of conspiracy). That emotional detachment and cynicism get you only so far.

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.

You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be. But they’re never going to. And even though you know they’re never going to, you still hope they will.

Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

Which brings me to the point of this: the egg-white omelette. I have friends who eat egg-white omelettes. Every time I’m forced to watch them eat egg-white omelettes, I feel bad for them. In the first place, egg-white omelettes are tasteless. In the second place, the people who eat them think they are doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed. Sometimes I try to explain that what they’re doing makes no sense, but they pay no attention to me because they have all been told to avoid dietary cholesterol by their doctors. According to The New York Times, the doctors are not deliberately misinforming their patients; instead, they’re the victims of something known as the informational cascade, which turns out to be something that’s repeated so many times that it becomes true even though it isn’t. (Why isn’t it called the misinformational cascade, I wonder.) In any case, the true victims of this misinformation are not the doctors but the people I know who’ve been brainwashed into thinking that egg-white omelettes are good for you. So this is my moment to say what’s been in my heart for years: it’s time to put a halt to the egg-white omelette. I don’t want to confuse this with something actually important, like the war in Afghanistan, which it’s also time to put a halt to, but I don’t seem be able to do anything about the war, whereas I have a shot at cutting down consumption of egg-white omelettes, especially with the wind of this new book in my sails. You...

We have ordered dessert. They are giving us dessert spoons. Dessert spoons are large, oval-shaped spoons. They are so large that you could go for a swim in them. I’m not one of those people who likes to blame the French for things, especially since the French turned out to be so very very right about Iraq, but there’s no question this trend began in France, where they’ve always had a weakness for dessert spoons. One of the greatest things about this land of ours, as far as I’m concerned, was that we never fell into the dessert-spoon trap. If you needed a spoon for dessert, you were given a teaspoon. But those days are over, and it’s a shame. Here’s the thing about dessert—you want it to last. You want to savor it. Dessert is so delicious. It’s so sweet. It’s so bad for you so much of the time. And, as with all bad things, you want it to last as long as possible. But you can’t make it last if they give you a great big spoon to eat it with. You’ll gobble up your dessert in two big gulps. Then it will be gone. And the meal will be over. Why don’t they get this? It’s so obvious. It’s so obvious.

But the truth is that any excuse will do when this sort of romance comes to an end. The details are just details. And the story is always the same: the younger woman idolizes the older woman; she stalks her; the older woman takes her up; the younger woman finds out the older woman is only human; the story ends.

I mention all this so you will understand that this is part of the process: once you find out he’s cheated on you, you have to keep finding it out, over and over and over again, until you’ve degraded yourself so completely that there’s nothing left to do but walk out.

The point is that for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me. And now it’s not. Now the most important thing about me is that I’m old.