Heartburn (Book review)

     Heartburn by Nora Ephron(1985) 30-year-old chick-lit, written well before Bridget Jones (which I confess I haven’t read). The narrator, Rachel, is a cookbook author and TV presenter, who’s pregnant with her second child. Mark is her husband, a columnist and political commentator, and a self-centred jerk. The setting is Washington and New York, and the couples that form Rachel and Mark’s social circle. Mark is having an affair, and worse, has told Rachel he loves his mistress. So the plot question is: What will Rachel do about it? She ends the marriage, of course, by throwing a lemon-mint cream pie in Mark’s face. It takes a while for her to get to that point, partly because she interrupts the story with flashbacks and recipes, and partly because random events interrupt the steady progress towards freedom from a jerk. The recipes are clearly based on actual cooking.
     The style is self-consciously “witty”, in that archly ironic 70s mode that grates. But about halfway through the book I was surprised to find I actually cared about Rachel, and enjoyed her willingness to like and even love her friends and acquaintances, including the ones she claims she hates. This isn’t a great book, but it’s an enjoyable read if you’re in the mood for a funny broken-romance story. Meryl Streep starred in the movie version, which I haven’t seen. **
     Update 2016-03-22: Apparently, the book is based on Ephron's own marriage and divorce. She's been called "courageous" for using her own life as copy for a book, which i think is excessive praise. I'm listening to an interview with Jacob Bernstein, her son, who's just made a doc about his mother titled "Everything is Copy", his mother's principle for living and writing. But she hid her terminal illness, partly because she was directing a movie, and admitting her illness would have mnade it impossible to get insurance. But mostly, says Jacob, because she wanted to control her story, and an illness is inherently uncontrollable. If he's right, Ephron's use of her story as material for a novel is a way of keeping control. Maybe her portrayal of Mark as a jerk is the ultimate control. We all want our life to work out better than it does. Fictionalising it lets us live our life as we wish it were. The purest fantasy of all.