Her Son on Nora's Final Act

Jacob Bernstein (yes, Carl was the dad) writes piece for this coming Sunday's NYT Magazine on mom Nora Ephron's last work, a play to debut in New York soon.   Just posted.

When Max said, “Mom, I’m going to miss you so much,” she said: “Miss me? Well, I’m not dead yet.”

For most of the next three days, before she entered a coma and died, she was sort of herself, asking for the papers and doing the crossword. On Sunday, one of the nurses arrived to give her medication and innocently asked if she was planning on writing about what was happening to her. My mother simply said, “No.”

I took this more or less at face value until after her death, as plans moved forward with her play “Lucky Guy,” and it occurred to me that part of what she was trying to do by writing about someone else’s death was to understand her own.

My influential book "So Wrong For So Long," on the media and the Iraq war, was published this week in an expanded edition and for the first time as an e-book.