Nora Ephron’s first article for Esquire where she was a star essayist in the ’70s is the definitive magazine profile of Helen Gurley Brown, who not only resurrected Cosmopolitan magazine, but already by 1970, had revolutionized the magazine business.
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A Few Words About Breasts
In a now iconic iteration of her Esquire column from 1972, Nora Ephron muses about “the hang-up of my life” her breasts.
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I have to begin with a few words about androgyny. In grammar school, in the fifth and sixth grades, we were all tyrannized by a rigid set of rules that supposedly determined whether we were boys or girls. The episode in
Huckleberry Finn where Huck is disguised as a girl and gives himself away by the way he threads a needle and catches a ball that kind of thing. We learned that the way you sat, crossed your legs, held a cigarette, and looked at your nails, your wristwatch, the way you did these things instinctively was absolute proof of your sex. Now obviously most children did not take this literally, but I did. I thought that just one slip, just one incorrect cross of