Nora Ephron: The Last Interview and Other Conversations - book review: An inspired tribute

Cleverly chosen in order to illustrate the trajectory of what was a gloriously piecemeal and progressive career

Melville House's Last Interview series is an inspired addition to their catalogue. Its only downside is that it's a little testosterone heavy right now. The wonderful Nora Ephron is only the second woman to be introduced to this particular hall of fame (the first was Hannah Arendt), joining the likes of Hemingway, Baldwin, Borges, Foster Wallace and Vonnegut. Let's hope future additions swell the female ranks because if Ephron's is anything to go on, it's a great idea.

As well as the titular “last interview” – conducted by Kathryn Borel and originally published in The Believer in March 2012, three months before Ephron passed away at the age of 71 – this edition also includes three other interviews. The first took place back in 1974 when Ephron was 32 and working as a journalist for Esquire and New York Magazine. The second, 2007's “Feminist with a Funny Bone”, was part of an “Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1990s” series that focuses on Ephron's success as a screenwriter and director since “coming home” to Hollywood in the 1980s (she grew up in LA, the daughter of screenwriting parents). The third is her final essay collection, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections, from 2010.

Cleverly chosen in order to illustrate the trajectory of what was a gloriously piecemeal and progressive career – as Ephron explains in the final interview, “Almost every 10 years, something in my work life has changed” – we track her progress from “the girls' department” working in a discipline still defined by a Mad Men-like male hierarchy, through to her reign as, in Borel's words, “the mother of all romantic comedy”, and “the original Tina Fey”.

Even the rather patronising title of the first 1970s essay, “Nice to see Nora Ephron happy in her work”, attests to the sexism she was up against when she started out as a writer, not to mention what were then considered appropriate questions for a (male) interviewer to ask: “Did your being a writer have anything to do with the way you met your husband?” And, “What are some of the problems of being a woman freelancer?” Her response to the latter is straight down the line in that “certain magazines” simply “will not assign pieces to women or even think of women in connection with certain subjects such as economics or politics”.

Although plenty of progress has been made since, unfortunately there's still a way to go. When pressed by Borel, Ephron explains that her response has always been to simply work hard: “To me, living well is the best revenge. You just have to keep writing things and doing what you do.”

Melville House, £11.99. Order for £10.49 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030