Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy had been feuding ever since they met at a writer's conference at Sarah Lawrence College in 1948. In 1980, McCarthy delivered the cruelest blow when she declared in a television interview with Dick Cavett that "every word [Lillian Hellman] writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" This comment prompted Hellman, who was watching the interview, to bring a slander suit against McCarthy. Nora Ephron's play, Imaginary Friends, which opened on Broadway on September 29, 2002, focuses on this lawsuit and the feuding that lead up to it.

Their bickering stemmed from, as Ephron notes in her introduction to the play, "McCarthy's love of the truth—which she turned into a religion—and . . . Hellman's way with a story, which she turned into a pathology." In Imaginary Friends, Ephron imagines a final meeting between the two women, in Hell, as they assess their lives and their antagonistic relationship through a series of razor-sharp verbal attacks on each other. Lisa D. Horowitz, in her review of the play for Variety, writes that Ephron's Hellman and McCarthy "prove, quite entertainingly, that they are each other's own special hell."