The story is told in the first person through the eyes of Rachel, a cookery writer, looking back on the time in her life when, seven months pregnant with her second child, she discovered that her husband was having an affair. Honestly, don’t read it on your commute unless you like guffawing in public, it really is that funny.īut it’s tinged with sadness and a smidgen of desperation, too, and there are brief moments of poignancy that give the tale a very human touch. It’s a brilliant comic read that transforms a personal tragedy into a laugh-out-loud farce. I came to Heartburn via my book group when it was chosen as our November read. She’s probably better known as the screenwriter of the Hollywood films When Harry Met Sally (1989) and Sleepless in Seattle (1993), among others. Recently republished as part of Virago’s Modern Classic 40th anniversary series, it was Ephron’s only novel (albeit a thinly disguised memoir about her own marriage break up with investigative journalist Carl Bernstein). Recently, they have found new life among younger fans, including extremely-online cook Alison Roman the vinaigrette was famously Instagramed by Olivia Wilde.Fiction – paperback Virago 192 pages 2018.įirst published in 1983, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn is a black comedy about the break up of a marriage between a high-flying journalist and a celebrity food writer. Fifteen recipes are salted throughout the novel, three alone for potatoes.
The novel became a gastronomic touchstone. The husband is “capable of having sex with a venetian blind.” His paramour is filleted as “a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed.” Ephron named her Thelma. It’s a monologue, a diatribe, a roman à clef deployed with heat-seeking barbs. To some readers, “Heartburn” is barely a novel. “You haven’t lived till you’ve squeezed my Washington Post” is deployed as a lecherous come-on by the president’s assistant. References to The Post, including the Style section, are peppered throughout.
“Heartburn” is a Washington novel and a Washington Post novel: It’s based on Ephron’s explosive breakup with legendary Post Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, who had an affair with the wife of the British ambassador when Ephron was many months pregnant with her and Bernstein’s second child.
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