How wonderful would it be if this review began with the disclaimer that Heartburn’s themes of infidelity and betrayal were outdated. Sadly, nearly four decades since its 1983 publication, Nora Ephron’s book is a relatable and gut-wrenching work of “fiction”, based on her real-life, short-lived marriage to Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, famous first for teaming up with Bob Woodward on Watergate, and second for being the fictionalized cheater Mark Forman in Heartburn.
If you’ve seen the film and you love it, reading the book is truly a new experience. Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson undoubtedly offer two of the most underrated performances of their careers, and with Meryl, at the forefront they tell a poignant story. But the book belongs to Nora’s Rachel Samstat, a New York food critic, who in her seventh months of pregnancy, learns that her husband has taken a lover. And this is how it starts.
What follows is the story of how one successful, intelligent, and extremely witty woman finds herself in love with and consistently longing to believe in the man she loves so much, not only because that was Ephron’s real life, but because it is real life. And there’s no point in analysis: It happens. Ephron is simply too damn talented not to make the book, in spite of all its surrounding sadness, a joyful ride inside her desperate and curious psyche. When things get a little too tense, food-writer Rachel offers the reader a delicious recipe for distraction. (Or maybe it is she who needs the distraction?) Either way, devastating storyline and semi-autobiographical elements aside, there is so much hope from the get-go that Ephron creates a smooth and seamless tale, and she makes us laugh through tears, as is her trademark.
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