My Nora Ephron Problem

Nora Ephron has been my literary idol since the mid-1970s. Long before the movie-going public discovered her screenwriting wit in “Heartburn” and “When Harry Met Sally,” I’d already devoured her laugh‑out‑loud essay collections “Crazy Salad” and “Scribble Scribble.” For years, her comic memoirs, “I Feel Bad About My Neck” and “I Remember Nothing,” sat on my bedside table, giving me a quick chuckle before turning out my light. Everything Nora wrote, until her untimely death in 2012, was gold to me.

Recently, I began working on another memoir. This one will be funny, I hope. I’m taking aim at anxious aging worsened by cheerleading social media influencers and their unlined faces. Working on it every morning from the balcony of my writing cabina has been literary therapy. I’m laughing my way through my own anxiety attacks, the ones that leave me feeling like a failure because I have to take blood pressure meds.

As Nora consistently cracked me up, I decided to try to channel her comic timing. I would love to make readers laugh out loud the way she had me roaring over so many of her essays. (Still an unbeatable classic: ‘Lisbeth Salander: The Girl who Fixed the Umlaut’, Nora’s take for the New Yorker on “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson. Find it and read it.)

If I were setting out on this project back in the day—you know, 2023—I would probably re‑read her magazine pieces. I might even re‑watch her movies, pen in hand, noting which lines landed and why. I could only dream of shaping my own words to sound even half as funny as Nora’s.

But it’s 2026, and I’m working with a new content editor. For those outside the writing world, content editors aren’t hired to correct spelling mistakes or misused colons. That’s typically the job of a copy editor. Content editors rewrite copy, sometimes entire paragraphs. 

The first time I worked with one was on “A Moveable Marriage: Relocate Your Relationship without Breaking It”. After she reworked a paragraph or two (or three) I was taken aback. But if I’m honest, I was thrilled by how much better I sounded than what was originally written. My human editor had taken my own words and made them sound more like the version of me I wanted to be.

Given this essay is filed under “Embracing AI,” a reader can probably guess where this is all going to land.

My new content editor is Perplexity AI. I didn’t have to wait six months for Mr. P. (as I’ve taken to calling him) to become available to work with me on my latest manuscript. No, Mr. P. is there right alongside me now at my desk every morning, inside my computer.

It’s been utterly discombobulating for all sorts of reasons, beginning with how much—and how quickly—AI improves my original drafts.

Mere seconds after soliciting feedback on the text I had written for the opening chapter (entirely on my own, by the way) Mr. P. spat back his revisions. He had inserted two incredibly funny descriptive details I had long forgotten about the living room in my childhood home that I just happened to be writing about. Reading them, I actually laughed out loud.

Of course, my next consideration was: “Wait. Is it honest to present as my own those colourful details about our sofa sealed in plastic and a bowl of bridge mix on a nearby coffee table that cleverly and accurately placed our living room in the 1960s?”

Or, as Perplexity, still channeling Nora, suggested I insert here: “Is it honest to present those details as my own when, in fact, they were suggested by a silicon chip that has never had a hot flash?”

You see my Nora Ephron problem now? 

At this point in the essay, I did what any mature, self‑respecting writer would do: I asked AI how to end it. It proposed something noble about “human–machine collaboration” and “the evolving landscape of creativity.” That sounded like the closing keynote at the kind of tech conference I would never attend in a million years.

But buried in that polished, not‑at‑all‑Nora paragraph he gave me was this line: “treat AI as a collaborator, not a ghostwriter.” That felt closer to my truth. Nora had editors after all. She also had directors and actors and friends who read drafts and said, “Cut that,” or “Build on that.” No one would accuse her of cheating by using a writing bot, which is a popular reaction when first embracing AI tools.

So, here’s a compromise I can live with: Mr. P. can remind me about plastic sofas and bridge mix, but he doesn’t get the last word. The last word goes to the woman who has actually had a hot flash, actually swallowed the blood pressure pill, and is the woman currently drafting a book that could reasonably be titled “I Feel Bad About My Anxiety.” 

I don’t think Nora would have any problem with that.