In her lecture “On Beginnings,” collected in the book Madness, Rack, and Honey, the poet Mary Ruefle considers Gaston Bachelard’s idea that “we begin in admiration and end by organizing our disappointment,” which she simplifies even further into “origins (beginnings) have consequences (endings).” Pulled and paraphrased from Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, where it originally referred to the practice of poetry and the ways we deal with the intrinsic inadequacies of language, it is a concept that can also be applied to an act even more mystical and bewildering: that of falling in love.

As Ruefle elaborates, “the moment of admiration is the experience of something unfiltered, vital and fresh” not unlike the sense of potential, amazement, and naivete with which one might enter a new romance. As the initial illusions fade and the realities make themselves known, the clarity afforded by disappointment becomes an opportunity to take agency and make decisions in marked contrast with the uncontrolled fall at the onset. Or as Ruefle puts it, a moment of “dignification” where the writer—or for our purposes, the lover—can take back control of the story.

For writer and director Nora Ephron, dignifying the consequences of her origins meant using it as fodder for her literary work. From the Esquire magazine essays that pulled from her daily life to the dynamic romantic comedy heroines she wrote to deliver her personal philosophies on screen like Meg Ryan-shaped ventriloquist puppets, Ephron was an unapologetic miner of her own lived experience; a self-described “cannibal” who took her screenwriter mother’s adage to heart that “everything is copy.”