Miriam Parker on Late Blooming and When Harry Met Sally

By Miriam Parker, August 17, 2022

Sally: And I’m gonna be forty.

Harry: When?

Sally: Someday.

Harry: In eight years.

Sally: But it’s there. It’s just sitting there, like this big dead end. And it’s not the same for men. Charlie Chaplin had babies when he was 73.

Harry: Yeah, but he was too old to pick them up.

It wasn’t until I was in my early thirties when I finally did the math. Sally was THIRTY-TWO in When Harry met Sally. Thirty-two! And it started to dawn on me: I’m almost thirty-two. I live in a small dark apartment on West 83rd street where I look at a brick wall—not nearly as nice as Sally’s Upper West Side apartment. I do not even have Cold Hard Mexican Ceramic Tile Floors or a Wagon Wheel Coffee Table or andirons. (I still, to be totally honest, am not clear on what andirons are.) This was my first clue that When Harry Met Sally was a fantasy. And a realization that the messages I internalized from it were wrong.

Source: Dear Sally Albright: 40 is Only the Beginning ‹ Literary Hub