Nora Ephron Didn't See This Coming
We can't have romcoms if this sh*t ain't funny.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter by Shani Silver.
If you know me long enough or feed me enough wine you’ll find out I kind of just want to be Nora Ephron. Her writing has lit me up for a lifetime. The way she stared life’s trivial tragedies in the face and made you laugh at the absurdity of human anxiety, the woman was an artist. I’m only that funny in my head on my treadmill. In addition to her talent, Nora Ephron had a way of depicting life as an attainable fantasy. Nothing was ever too far out of reach, no romantic story too farfetched to happen to you someday. But she never experienced red pill podcast bros demonizing women and corporate greed’s demolition of dating culture. She wrote romcoms before “rom” got so bleak it wasn’t “com” anymore. There’s nothing I wouldn’t give to see her make things funny again. Preferably at a matinee with a crispy diet fountain drink the size of a mop bucket on my lap.
She made it seem like the imperfection of me was capable of being loved. I was raised on her world, so there was no way to know the only male attention destined for me would come from 65-year-old men on the internet with abhorrent voting histories, goatees pretending to be jawlines, and nothing to lose. Nora Ephron didn’t tell me I’d enter my 40s never married, in a desolate void absent of real male contact. She didn’t prepare me to only interact with women for years at a time because I literally never see any single human men to talk to. I am getting really sick of women. I love women, I love my friends, but I’m a heterosexual woman who cannot permanently sustain herself on social smoothies made of only one gender. There is a blandness to my life, the same flavor repeating itself over and over until I start resenting food. I am surrounded by the most loving, creative, fun women I’ve ever known, and I am losing my fucking mind. Nora, help.