"Heartburn" by Nora Ephron

A roman a clef in which the author turns the break-up of her marriage into light comedy.

It's narrated in the first person and the past tense. The author disguises herself as a food writer but the husband/ villain is rather more thinly disguised as a Washington reporter (in reality he was Carl Bernstein, one of the investigative reporters who exposed the Watergate scandal). The novel was adapted into a film.

It is frenetically fast-paced and full of quips, like the romantic comedy movies Ephron wrote, directed and produced. It reminded me of an American sitcom. I didn't find it particularly amusing.

It starts with a great hook: “The reason I was hardly in a position to date on first learning that my second husband had taken a lover was that I was seven months pregnant.” (Ch 1) I should immediately have sympathised with the main character. But I couldn't. She didn't seem heart-broken, in fact even that hook itself is written as part of a joke. This should be a major tragedy in her life and she is wise-cracking. Perhaps her relentless humour is a defence strategy but it worked in the sense that I never had any sense that there was a vulnerable human underneath the robotic comedy. 

It helps that there are no financial pressures: she leaves her husband and takes her two-year-old son and heavily pregnant self to New York by air; here she squats in her father's apartment. The kid is never an inconvenience; she does what she wants and always finds a maid to take care of it. In New York she is held up at gunpoint but even this is scarcely traumatic. The book skated along on wisecracks and trivialities and never challenged my emotions at all. 

She describes a typical dinner-party conversation thus: “Then we would move on to the important matters. Should they paint their living room peach? Should they strip down their dining table? Should they buy a videotape recorder? Should they re-cover the couch?” (Ch 7) I suppose most life is fundamentally trivial and this contributed to the novel's verisimilitude. But basically I didn't care. It's not as if her trivialities are everyday trivialities, cocooned as she is in her privileged world as a best-selling cookery writer married to a heavily-syndicated journalist. There are no ordinary people in her social circle, even her therapy group has a famous actress in it. 

If you like lightweight froth (and it shouldn't be lightweight froth, it's about a marriage breaking up), this is the book for you.

Selected quotes:

• “My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone would do it for you.” (Ch 2)
• “If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters.” (Ch 4)
• “There's a real problem in dragging a group into a book: you have to introduce six new characters ... who are never going to be mentioned again in any essential way but who nonetheless have to be sketched in.” (Ch 4)
• “That's what marriage is ... after a certain point it's just patch, patch, patch.” (Ch 4)
• “It's true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.” (Ch 7)
• “You know how old you have to be before you stop wanting to fuck strangers? ... Dead, that's how old.” (Ch 8)
• “When you have a baby you set off an explosion in your marriage ... all the power struggles of the marriage have a new playing field.” (Ch 11)

February 2025; 179 pages

First published in 1983 (by Heinemann in the UK)

My Virago paperback edition was issued in 2018

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God