The Huffington Post | Arianna Huffington: Heartbroken in Manhattan

Arianna Huffington: Heartbroken in Manhattan - Remembering Nora Ephron

In time, Nora excelled not only as a blogger but as a blogging evangelist, spreading word of the medium’s particular value and making many converts. She quickly grasped that ”one of the reasons for blogging was to start the conversation and to create the community that comes together briefly to talk about things they might not be talking about if you hadn’t written your blog.” And, to the surprise of no one, she summed it all up with a memorable, perfect metaphor: “A blog was a soap bubble,” she wrote, “meant to last just a moment or two.”

She was a contributing editor who more than lived up to her name — regularly offering up notes, suggestions, and terrific ideas. She was also the godmother of our very popular Divorce section. Two years ago I was spending the weekend with her on Long Island, as was Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times. One morning, Alessandra and I headed off on a long walk down the beach, and we ended up talking a lot about our divorces. When we got back to Nora’s we told her about our talk, and she said that she’d actually been thinking for a while that HuffPost’s next section should be devoted to all things divorce.

Over breakfast, Nora came up with the tagline for the section — “Marriage comes and goes but divorce is forever” — and Alessandra offered up what has become our inaugural divorce aphorism (the first in a series): “His happiness is a small price to pay for my freedom!” As Nora said, “Far too much attention is paid to aphorisms about falling in love and not nearly enough to those about falling out of love.” So the spark was lit and, four months later, we launched HuffPost Divorce — featuring an exclusive essay about divorce taken from Nora’s book, I Remember Nothing.