Would Nora Ephron Like Me?

I am embarrassed to say I have pondered this question.

I have rolled it over in my mind. I have had pretend conversations with my hero where she told me all her secrets for insightful, beautiful comedic writing and somehow I was able to keep up. I wasn’t just dumbfounded and staring at her, with stars in my eyes, my jaw resting on the ground. In these hypothetical exchanges, I would be vivacious and brilliant and frothy and basically not at all how I usually am upon first meeting anyone. Let alone the person whose films inadvertently raised me whenever I would switch to ITV2 mid-afternoon on a weekend.

I think it is why I am unable to jump onboard when anybody says they wish so badly that Julie & Julia had just been about Julia Childs and her husband. Tweets about how Julie is annoying and insufferable do not spur me to like but simply sigh.

Because I am more like Julie than Julia. I feel like most of us are. Perhaps that is where this resentment spawns from. Actually, I am certain it is.

Every time I watch it, I connect so deeply with Julie’s desire to emulate this woman she reveres and truly loves. To be her, in the only way she knows she can. Her work. And how this task, in the movie, proves to be impossible. And she also causes her idol to dislike her and her failed mimicry.

It’s all the same desperate feeling you get at a party, where there is a woman who is tall and pretty, with seemingly perfect skin, who talks about her grand accomplishments with the same detached, casual tone you would reserve for discussing how hot it might be tomorrow. The women who gain instant celebrity in your eyes because they are, to you, truly inimitable. Forever out of reach.

I think the poeticism of the movie is in that push and pull all women have felt at some point. Of wanting to be someone else. A woman who has it together. Who’s talented. Who’s adored. Who’s perfection. Who is someone else other than you.

And, despite all the perceived notions of rom-coms being nothing but fluff, Julie & Julia tackles this, I think quite universal, topic quite well. It has the guts to give you the honest answer to “Would (insert idol’s name here) have liked me?”

Which is . . . no. Probably not.

But, the meaning of that person’s work will always be significant. Perhaps, and this is just an idea, being liked should not be the sole aim of a person's life.

It certainly wasn’t Nora’s.