This is Why

“All her life, [Nora Ephron] 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.’

—from Jacob Bernstein’s piece in the NYT on his mother, Nora Ephron