This book is a comic retelling of the end of the author’s second marriage. As she says in the introduction: ” . the book you’re about to read . . is often referred to as a thinly disguised novel. I have no real quarrel with this description, even though I’ve noticed, over the years, that the words ‘thinly disguised’ are applied mostly to books written by women. Let’s face it, Philip Roth and John Updike picked away at the carcasses of their early marriages in book after book, but to the best of my knowledge they were never hit with the thinly disguised thing.” It’s true, this mid-twentieth century generation of novelists seem to have been obsessed with their exes: our current easy-come-easy-go relationship to marriage doesn’t seem to provide quite the same grist for the novelistic mill.
HEARTBURN is a light-hearted story, though a little gimmicky for my taste, with receipes included throughout as part of the plot. I think the actual divorce must have been awful: she had a two year old and was seven months pregnant when she found out her husband was not just having sex with someone else but actually in love with her. As she says: “I’ve managed to convert an event that seemed to me hideously tragic at the time to a comedy – and if that’s not fiction, I don’t know what is.”
I also enjoyed the setting – it’s New York among the monied classes in the 1970s, so everyone is eating souffle and out to out-anecdote everyone else. Overall though I found the book a little forgettable, and felt like it would be better on screen, as the best thing about it was the dialogue and the set pieces (e.g., falling into a seal pond). Then I realised Nora Ephron was in fact a screenwriter. Extra points if you know a movie she wrote. (I’ll date myself with a clue: Men and women can’t be friends . . .)