NORA EPHRON was born in Manhattan in 1941 and grew up in Beverly Hills. Her parents were Broadway playwrights, who would base the play Take Her, She's Mine on letters she sent home from Wellesley College. After graduation, Ephron became a journalist, writing for the New York Post , New York magazine, The New York Times Sunday Magazine , Cosmopolitan , and Esquire , where her 1972 piece "A Few Words About Breasts" made her a household name as an essayist. Her marriage to and subsequent divorce from Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein inspired her first novel, Heartburn , which was published in 1983 and later became a movie starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing for the films Silkwood , When Harry Met Sally , and Sleepless in Seattle , and her essay collection I Feel Bad About My Neck was a number-one New York Times bestseller. She died in New York City in 2012, at the age of seventy-one.