“I’ll have what she’s having.”

There are few writers whose voices have been so indelibly stamped on our psyches that they can be conjured up with just one line. Nora Ephron, the godmother of the modern rom-com, is one of them (even if she didn’t take credit for the line in question).

Her spiky heroines, epistolary romances, cable knit sweaters and explorations of intimacy and heartbreak transformed American cinema, giving rise to a generation of screenwriters and directors who have striven to follow in her oxford-clad footsteps (not to mention the swarms of fans for whom films like “You’ve Got Mail” and “When Harry Met Sally” are annual viewing traditions, bookending that sepia-tinged, pencil-shaving-scented season known as “Nora Ephron Fall”).

ImageMeg Ryan in a climactic scene in “When Harry Met Sally,” one of Ephron’s many films that took women — their neuroses and their desires — seriously.Credit...Columbia Pictures, via Everett CollectionImageRyan and Rosie O’Donnell in “Sleepless in Seattle.” The movie is as much a celebration of their characters’ friendship as of romantic love.Credit...TriStar Pictures

Ilana Kaplan explores this legacy in NORA EPHRON AT THE MOVIES (Abrams, $50) — a tribute, despite its title, not just to Ephron’s screen work but also to her essays, plays and searingly autobiographical novel, “Heartburn.”

Each of them gets a chapter here, as do the fastidious enthusiasms that illuminate them all: Ephron’s love of language, her eye for fashion and her devotion to food. This is a woman, Kaplan explains, who turned ordering a piece of pie into an art form and whose version of a postcoital cigarette, in “Heartburn,” was an in-bed bowl of homemade spaghetti carbonara.

ImageEphron’s passions — for language, fashion, food — infused her work.Credit...Katherine Wolkoff/Trunk ArchiveImageShe also drew on her personal heartbreaks, particularly in her novel, “Heartburn,” and its subsequent film adaptation, which starred Meryl Streep as an Ephron-esque food writer.Credit...Paramount, via Everett CollectionImageStanley Tucci and Meryl Streep in “Julie and Julia,” Ephron’s final film.Credit...Jonathan Wenk

Ephron’s clarity of voice gave her work a steely backbone, bolstered by a screwball wit. She did not invent the meet-cute, the swoony set piece or the friends-to-lovers trope, but she made them so thoroughly her own that you’d be forgiven for thinking she did. Above all else, she took women seriously — their desires and neuroses, their careers, their friendships, their great beating hearts.

Whatever she wrote aboutbest slots to play, we wanted what she was having.

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