Ephron - 1967,1970,

FICTION

Heartburn

ESSAYS

I Feel Bad About My Neck
Scribble Scribble
Crazy Salad

DRAMA

Imaginary Friends

SCREENPLAYS

Bewitched (with Delia Ephron)
Hanging Up (with Delia Ephron)
Youve Got Mail (with Delia Ephron)
Michael (with Jim Quinlan, Pete Dexter, and Delia Ephron)
Mixed Nuts (with Delia Ephron)
Sleepless in Seattle (with David S. Ward and Jeff Arch)
This Is My Life (with Delia Ephron)
My Blue Heaven
When Harry Met Sally
Cookie (with Alice Arlen)
Heartburn
Silkwood (with Alice Arlen)

WALLFLOWER AT THE ORGY
A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with the author

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Viking edition published October 1970
Bantam edition / July 1980
Bantam trade paperback reissue / July 2007

These stories originally appeared in Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Eye, Holiday, New York, the New York Times Book Review, and the New York Times Magazine in slightly different form. If Youre a Little Mouseburger, Come With Me. I Was a Mouseburger And I Will Help You. originally appeared in Esquire under the title Helen Gurley Brown Only Wants to Help.

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

All rights reserved
Copyright 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971 by Nora Ephron
Introduction 1980 by Nora Ephron

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73125948

Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-307-79693-6

www.bantamdell.com

v3.1

THIS BOOK IS FOR DAN

WALLFLOWER AT THE ORGY , my first collection, was published in 1970. It contains the first group of articles I sold to magazines after I left the New York Post, where I was a reporter for five years. I dont think anything could have better prepared me for magazine writing than those years at the Postthough not for the reasons you might suspect. The Post was a terrible newspaper in the era I worked there, and everyone knew it: as a result, those of us who worked for the Post were treated far more shabbily than reporters for other newspapers. It was often extremely difficult to get an interview with whomever you were writing about; and if you did get an interview, it often took place at the end of the day, after the subject was exhausted from hours of interviews with reporters from more important media outlets. I remember, in my years at the Post, reading the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times and wondering why the reporters for that section were able to spend entire days with subjects I could barely get in to see; it never crossed my mind that it might have more to do with the clout of the publication involved than with the charm of the reporter. But the point is this: I was better off with my forty-five minutes because I was forced to report around the subject. I learned to go through the clips, find the names of people from the subjects past, hunt them up in old telephone books, track them down, and pull out anecdotes they knew. What Im saying may seem obvious; but one of the things that stuns me is how seldom reporters do this: the standard magazine profile these days seems to be written after a reporter spends a lot of time with the person the profiles about, and only with that person. I cant imagine that. I cant imagine even going to see the person the profiles about until Ive seen twenty or thirty people who knew him when.

The other advantage to all those years in the newspaper business is that I learned to write short. Much too short probably, but as vices go, thats far better than much too long. Nothing in the Post ran over fifteen hundred words: six hundred words was more like it. And the lack of space forced me to select, to throw out everything but the quote I liked best, the story that seemed most telling. Again, I dont mean to sound obvious, but several years ago I spent a year as a magazine editor, and I realized how difficult selectivity is for reporters who are spoiled by large amounts of space. I also dont mean to sound as if I learned all this on my own; I had good editors at the Post. I complained about them at the time, complained as they slashed out what I thought of as my gorgeous stylistic flourishes and what they thought of as wretched excesses largely inspired by worship of Tom Wolfe. But they were right. And as a result, my writing stylesuch as it isis very spare. Which is lucky for me, because it turned out that there were very few editors in the magazine business as good as those I had at the Post.

Because I began as a newspaper reporter, it took me a long time to become comfortable using the first-person singular pronoun in my work. In the articles in this book I used it gingerly, often after considerable prodding from my editors. I was uncomfortable with it. The work I have done subsequently is considerably more personal and considerably more full of the first-person singular pronoun, but I still believe that the best approach to its use ought to be discomfort. Do you really need it? Does it add something special to the piece? Is what you think interesting enough to make the reader care? Are you saying something that no one has said? Above all, do you understand that you are not as important as what youre covering? We are now in an era when the I-lost-my-laundry-while-covering-Yalta school of reporting has become an epidemic; when serious books that involve reporting often tend to be suffused with the authors admiration of his own investigative techniques; when the narcissism of the press almost outstrips the narcissism elsewhere in the country. The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party. I look back on the original introduction to this book with a nostalgia that borders on pain. There are times when I am seized with an almost uncontrollable desire to blurt out, in the middle of interviews, Me! Me! Me! Enough about you. What about me? I actually wrote that. I actually believed that. And now, here I am, after two subsequent booksand the book tours, the newspaper interviews, the television talk shows, after all the me-me-me. It must be difficult being on the other side of the notebook, the reporters who interview me say. No. Not particularly. Its boring. And unbelievably repetitive. And terminally narcissistic. But not difficult.

Rereading this collection produced other fits of nostalgia. I am no longer the young woman who wrote about being made over by Cosmopolitan magazine, and I am no longer interested enough in the culture of kitsch to defend Jacqueline Susann. But here are these remnants of my former self, old snakeskins, and it amuses me to read them and remember how dippy I used to be. There are also pieces here that Im proud of. But theres nothing here extraordinary or brilliant; I am a journeyman, and if these articles work, they work as examples of old-fashioned journalism. I am not a new journalist, whatever that is; I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms. Which is fine with me.