“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” — Nora Ephron
Ephron returned to Wellesley College for its 1996 commencement, 34 years after graduating there. The seniors had chosen her to give the address, and she told them the rules for women had changed since her own class finished in 1962.
She described classmates who’d never meant to be heroines but “ended up feeling like victims.” In the same speech, she recalled a classmate at their 25th reunion describing their education as “a dress rehearsal for a life we never led.”
As a Wellesley junior, Ephron had briefly been engaged. She recalled her class dean’s advice in the 1996 address: “when you marry, take a year off.” Her mother had a career, and Ephron had always planned to work herself.
A week before graduating in 1962, she got a job at Newsweek through an employment agency. She was hired as a mail girl for $55 a week. In February 1963, at 21, she became a New York Post reporter, earning $98 a week.
In 1976, she married Carl Bernstein, a Washington Post reporter. While pregnant with their 2nd child, she discovered his affair. By December 1979, she was back in New York with their 2 children as the marriage broke up.
She turned the breakup into Heartburn, her 1983 novel about Bernstein’s affair with Margaret Jay. The book took her 2 years to write.
That history sits behind the line she left the graduates. She had lived the old script and then written past it, which is why the advice to take charge of your own story came from someone who knew what it cost not to.