It is hard to believe that Nora Ephron is dead. She was too full of vitality to die—and much too funny. If anyone could outwit death I’d cast my vote with her.

There is much to celebrate about a multi-talented woman like Nora (no, I never knew her), but inevitably, because I’m a writer, I think about her achievements as a writer. She had an impressive gift for comedy (which I covet!), but what I admire most about her work is its fearlessness. Her comedy was often drawn from saying—or having her characters say—the unspeakable. Who can forget the scene in When Harry Met Sally when Meg Ryan demonstrates in public how to fake an orgasm. She’s not really going to do this, I thought as I watched, but of course she did, she took the orgasm to completion, replete with gasps and moans, right there in the restaurant in front of Billy Crystal. How funny that was (is)! How bold! Nora understood deeply, maybe instinctively, how transgression yields the most trenchant humor.

Another element of her fearlessness is the way she was able to mine her own pain and humiliation as fodder for the work. She once said, “My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.” This sounds easier than it is. Mining your own life means exposing yourself, letting people see how petty and weak you can be. After years of writing I am only now beginning to use my own life as direct inspiration for a novel. But Nora did so from the start of her writing career. Her acrimonious divorce became the source of her novel Heartburn, and her hatred of aging the source of her most recent book I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman. Like all good comedy writers—any good writer of any stripe—she wasn’t afraid to look unflinchingly at pain, especially her own.

Now that Nora is gone I hope she is available for channeling. Couldn’t we all afford to look at the dark side of life more directly and honestly and try to make of it more powerful art?