Nora Ephron made her name scriptwriting romantic comedy films like Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally, but it was her own life that provided the fodder for her first and only novel, Heartburn.
No shortage of fodder there. Heartburn is a very lightly fictionalized version of her marriage to Carl Bernstein (yes, of Woodward/Bernstein fame, the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal that brought on Nixon’s resignation and led to every political scandal being named -gate). They had one child, and while she was pregnant with their second she discovered he was having an affair.
Infidelity and heartbreak do not usually make a happy tale, yet Ephron’s wry take on life and marriage is often funny:
I should have figured it out, of course. By the time I did, the thing had been going on for months, for seven months — for exactly as long as my pregnancy. I should have known, should have suspected something sooner, especially since Mark spent so much time that summer at the dentist. There sat Sam and I in West Virginia, making air holes in jars full of caterpillars, and there went Mark, in and out of Washington, to have root canals and gum treatments and instructions in flossing and an actual bridge, never once complaining about the inconvenience or the pain or the boredom of having to listen to Irwin Tannebaum, DDS, drone on about his clarinet. Then it was fall, and we were all back in Washington, and every afternoon Mark would emerge from his office over the garage and say he was going out to buy socks.
Set largely in 1980s Washington with snippets of New York, this is a thoroughly East Coast, upper middle-class novel. All the characters are wealthy and well-connected; they have multiple homes and housekeepers, and their gossipy conversations relate to their own small circle. Infidelity, divorce and changing relationships are rife within this social set.
“Is it a boy or a girl?”, asked Richard.
“Is what a boy or a girl?” I said.
“The person Mark’s fallen in love with,” said Richard.
“I know you don’t like Mark,” I said, “but that is truly an absurd question.”
“It’s a girl, right?” said Richard.
“Right”, I said.
“That’s what Helen’s fallen in love with, too,” said Richard.
Ephron has a biting pen and she was a woman wronged. She could have written a vicious take-down of her ex, but she is too much of an entertainer to do so, or to play the victim. Instead, the book reads like a tale told over dinner by an amusing raconteur making hay out of a unpleasant event. And like many such raconteurs, there are times when they go on too long. Some of Ephron’s stream-of-consciousness paragraphs would have been better in small doses, like the essays and columns she published later in her career.
Almost 50 years old now, the novel is distinctly dated at times. There is the occasional swipe at feminists, startling descriptions of the housekeepers that border on racist, and casual comments about homosexuals that were perhaps cool in Ephron’s set in the 1980s, but are offputting today. That said, it is probably quite an accurate description of the conversations in their mileu at the time.
Novels with recipes are plentiful these days, but Heartburn might have been one of the early ones. Ephron’s character finds comfort in cooking — potatoes, lima bean casserole, bacon hash, cheesecake … and the lemon meringue pie that features in one of the most satisfying scenes of the book and film.
Ephron got to see her characters played by Meryl Street and Jack Nicholson in the film. They are both excellent, needless to say, and the film followed the novel exactly. The charm of the book, though, was Ephron’s commentary on life, which is entirely missing in the film. The film is simply the tale of a woman who discovers her husband having an affair, and is rarely funny. While it is, as always, wonderful to watch the subtle changes of emotion on Street’s face, as Rachel Samstat she is at first self-absorbed and overwrought, and later calmly oblivious to anything outside her own life and circle.
Why did Ephron write this novel?
Because if I tell the story, I control the version.
Divorce, it is generally agreed, affects women’s financial and social status far more than it does men. Despite the imperfections of this novel, it’s hard not to root for a woman who gets to tell her own story.
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