When Ephron asked the class of 1996 what they were going to do with their lives, she answered her own question: 'Everything, is my guess.' But she was honest about what 'everything' looks like in practice — not a tidy progression but a glorious mess of competing demands, unexpected turns, and constant reinvention. Her own biography was the proof. She had been a journalist, a feminist, a New Yorker, divorced, funny — and then a writer, a director, a mother, a sister, happy. Not one of the five words she would have used to describe herself at their age appeared on her list ten years later, and not one of those appeared on her current list. This was not instability but what she called 'one of the most delicious things available to women' — the freedom to shift, change course, and take multiple paths. The aside about four careers and three husbands brought the house down.