DOLLY ALDERTON on Heartburn
There are three things that are impossible to write. Food, flirting and heartbreak. Heartburn by Nora Ephron, the mostloved and most-read book on my shelf, effortlessly nails all three. It is the study of a whole relationship in 150 or so pages – a marriage’s architecture, rupture and its eventual demolition.
The narrator, Rachel, tells us what it was like to fall in love with her husband Mark, including an unbelievably sexy passage in which he teaches her how to dance. She describes the lustful stupor they fall into: ‘We went out to dinner. And then we went to bed. We stayed there for about three weeks.’ Followed by domestic, carb-filled bliss: ‘Whenever I fall in love, I begin with potatoes. Sometimes meat and potatoes and sometimes fish and potatoes, but always potatoes.’ For the majority of the book, she describes heartbreak. Or, as she physically experiences it, heartburn, while she tries to make sense of his infidelity, which she discovers when seven months pregnant with their second baby.
Sounds miserable, doesn’t it? But while it is raw and painful in moments, Heartburn is also hilarious. It is a unique portrait of heartbreak because Ephron finds the unexpected details of emotional devastation – the absurdity, mundanity and embarrassment of it.
It is unfathomable to me that this is so many people’s favourite book, because every time I read it, I truly believe it was written just for me.
It is often called a thinly disguised memoir. Like Rachel, Nora Ephron’s husband, the journalist Carl Bernstein, had an affair while Nora was pregnant with their second child. Their breakup was very public. Nora’s infamous mantra, borrowed from her writer mother, is that ‘everything is copy’, so it is unsurprising that such a life event should end up in her work. But it is still a piece of work rather than a piece of therapy, and to reduce this beautiful novel into a large tell-all confession is to grossly undermine it.
I don’t care about what’s real and what isn’t. It will always make me laugh; it will always make me cry. And of all the things I’ve ever tried, it remains the most effective medication for a broken heart.