At one point, Rachel, who is a food columnist, admits to her therapist that she tells stories about her life in order to “control” the narrative. But Ephron, in Heartburn, wasn’t looking to soul-search-this was her revenge novel.

Nor do I think that men are just dogs-which is the book’s explanation for her husband, Mark Feldman’s, behavior-or that the happiest ending is finding a new relationship. She was a master, so my cavils over Heartburn‘s myths about romance will be brief: I don’t think a woman who stays in a bad relationship is just a starry-eyed believer in true love, as the heroine, Rachel Samstat, is presented to be. Heartburn was a cultural sensation in the suburbs of my youth, such that I recall my mother cackling over the film adaptation and criticizing Meryl Streep’s looks-not pretty enough! The story was said to be inspired by Ephron ’s divorce from Carl Bernstein and has always been considered a delicious revenge plot by a spurned woman upon a cheating man.Įphron had a dazzling career as a trailblazer for women in journalism, and she wrote many of the greatest movies of all time, including When Harry Met Sally. I remember-from 1983, the year the book was published-it being marketed as a “hilarious” comedy about a woman cooking her way out of a broken heart at the end of a marriage.

Hence my fraught relationship with Heartburn by Nora Ephron.

I am a baker of pies and a believer in pleasures, but also the kind of killjoy who can’t take a rom-com in the spirit it’s intended.

Heartburn novel by nora ephron