Heartburn (1983): Nora's Novel Life
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its publication, join us for a two-part series on Nora's first (and only) novel.
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As many Ephron-A-Thon readers would know, it’s the 40-year anniversary of Nora Ephron’s first, and last, novel. We’re marking the occasion with a two-part series: read on for our analysis of Heartburn (the novel), and make sure you join us next month for Heartburn (the film).
What is Heartburn?
Hollie: When Heartburn was published in the United States in March 1983, it swiftly entered the cultural zeitgeist. Based on the slew of anniversary essays published this month, it never really left. For four decades, people have been arguing about whether the novel should be read as a thinly veiled autobiographical account of Nora’s (very) public divorce from Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein.
Heartburn tells the story of narrator Rachel Samstat, a food writer, who is married to political journalist Mark Feldman. At seven months pregnant, Rachel discovers that Mark is having an affair. The novel follows Rachel as she leaves Washington, D.C. for New York with her two children, and is interspersed with Rachel’s recipes.
In this edition of The Ephron-A-Thon, we take a look at the context surrounding the novel’s release: what was the “fact” readers were trying to parse from the “fiction,” anyway? What did critics think back in 1983? We round-off with our personal reflections on Heartburn.
The real Heartburn
Marama: In January 1980, media circles were ablaze when Nora announced (via a gossip columnist friend) that “Carl’s a rat”—and she was leaving him.1 The previous year, Nora had found out that her husband (a notorious ladies’ man) was having an affair with Margaret Jay, daughter of British Prime Minister James Callaghan and wife of the UK ambassador to the US. At the time, Nora was seven months pregnant with their second child. Their son was born prematurely, and two weeks later, Ephron decamped to New York with both of their children.
It is important to understand that Washington, D.C. and New York were the axis of the US media landscape at this time. They were the location of all of the most important mastheads, writers, and sources. Bernstein, one half of the duo who helped to break the Watergate scandal, was a bonafide celebrity. Nora had the family connections, had made impressive strides in the previous decade, and seemed to know everyone. So when People picked up the news, it reported the separation in its famous “split!” section. Friends and colleagues took sides. The battle lines were clearly drawn.
When Nora published Heartburn three years later, she blew the wound open again, not only for Bernstein but for the interested public. The interest in her personal life had not abated; indeed she was paid an “unusually high” USD$341,000 for the novel by publisher Pocket Books (a cool USD$1 million in today’s money).2 Even so, she knew the publication would be controversial. As she acknowledged to the Washington Post in a 1983 profile, “"Everybody is not going to like this book.”
Contemporary reviews
Hollie: When Heartburn hit the shelves in 1983, it quickly joined the New York Times best-seller list, where it remained for twenty-seven weeks. Reader reception is an awfully tricky thing to try and figure out—we’ll never know, for example, how many people cheerfully bought a copy of the book, read three pages, and popped it down on their bedside table, really meaning to get back to it, but never quite managing. What we can know is what professional reviewers thought about the book.
Reviews in Australia and the UK
As an Australian, I feel it is my solemn responsibility to remind everyone (Americans) that people cared about Nora and Heartburn in both hemispheres. Admittedly only a handful of reviews were published in Australia following the release of Heartburn in 1983 (although there was renewed interest in the antipodes following the release of the film in 1986).3 Not to be gender essentialist about it, but the two male reviewers clearly empathised with Bernstein rather than Ephron.4 Veronica Sen, in her snappy review for the Canberra Times, praised the novel’s “believable dialogue” and a “masterly bittersweet ending”—and didn’t mention Nora’s real-life at all!5 As we’ll soon discover, that was A Feat.
Heartburn received a little more attention in the UK, with most British reviewers paying close attention to Nora’s real life.6 Glenys Roberts in Liverpool Daily labelled the novel “faction,” while the Cambridge Daily News declared the “book relies heavily on readers having retained an interest in the over-exposed world of [American] publishing and broadcasting.”7 You’ll have to trust me when I say nothing comes close to touching the gloriously unabashed and gossipy framing used by the Daily Mirror, which didn’t even pretend to care about the literary merits of the novel. Just look at the header they included, which identified the real-life players as though they were characters in a soap: Nora (loved and lost), Carl (brash lover), Margaret (the wife who strayed) and Peter (husband betrayed).8
Reviews in the U-S-of-A
American journalists were, presumably, well-briefed ahead of the release of Ephron’s novel—and they were ready with their reviews. What did they have to say? Every US review I read mentioned Ephron’s divorce. The majority of reviewers used Ephron’s divorce as the opening hook (although some people opted for cooking-related openers).9 I only read one review that centred on Ephron's skill as a writer, and held off on mentioning the autobiographical element until the third paragraph.10 Almost all reviewers agreed Heartburn was funny (sometimes very funny!); a solidly entertaining way to pass time. There was less consensus about the novel’s emotional weight.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in his review for the New York Times, argued:
“It’s a fairly pointless exercise to keep substituting real people and events for what goes on in the course of ‘Heartburn’ … to compare Miss Ephron’s story with reality, far from enhancing its effectiveness, is likely to distance the reader from the novel’s modest virtues as a work of the imagination.”
Whatever you think of the merit of Lehmman-Haupt’s argument, one thing is clear: he didn’t convince many (any?) critics to abandon their critique-through-context approach. Four decades on, most writers still use the link between Nora’s story and Heartburn to open their essays. Jury’s out on whether Lehmann-Haupt would prefer the next-most-popular hook in 2023: Olivia Wilde’s salad dressing.
1983 Heartburn reviews by the numbers
Reviews-reviewed: 17
Number of reviews that mentioned Ephron’s real-life: 15
Number of reviews that mentioned Nora’s boobs: 2
Best reference to Heartburn’s autobiographical origins: A tie between “Ephron skinny-dips in print” and “faction?”
Number of recipe-related puns: 3
Most sexist review: Maurice Dunlevy, for the Canberra Times, labelled Ephron “naughty Nora” and declared that if “[Bernstein] had to live on” the recipes included in Heartburn “he may not have been such a rat after all.”11 An honourable mention to Cheryl Lavin’s Chicago Tribune review, which included an upsetting amount of detail about how skinny Nora was.
Our reviews
Marama: I am in two minds about reading this book through the lens of autobiography. As a cultural historian, I can’t separate this novel from its juicy, juicy context. And as a feminist historian, I can’t ignore Nora’s frustration at having to explain again, and again, that this was also a work of fiction. This kind of reading is so often reserved for art by women (see also: Taylor Swift). The assumption is that women are so unskilled that they couldn’t possibly find creativity or inspiration outside of their own lives.
Of course, Heartburn is unequivocally based on Nora’s life and experiences. For many critics and interviewers, the fact that Nora opened one window into her heartbreak seemed to imply that they were welcome to crash through the door anytime they liked, day or night. I don’t think that an artist surrenders every personal boundary simply because they choose to draw on their life experiences, and Nora’s insistence on this in interviews at the time (and later in life) was refreshing.12
I don’t think Heartburn is Nora’s best work. It meanders and in parts it lacks the spark of her journalism. But it is one of her most interesting. I love the verisimilitude of describing the cookbooks written by narrator Rachel as “very personal and chatty [...] I write chapters about friends or relatives or trips or experiences, and work in the recipes peripherally”—and then writing Heartburn in the same way. I haven’t cooked any of the recipes, but they work to conjure up feelings of warmth, generosity—and certainly the 1980s (that key lime pie, oh boy).
Still, this is Nora, so Heartburn made me laugh out loud multiple times. But mostly it made me feel very, very sad. What must it be like to set out your worst experience, and some of your ugliest feelings, to be picked over by an audience already obsessed with your relationship?13 How could she have prepared for the vitriolic response from many critics and readers who decried Nora for airing her dirty laundry and, as they perceived, dragging her two young children into it.14 As Vanity Fair critic Leon Wiseltier infamously wrote following news of the forthcoming movie adaptation: “Here is Carl Bernstein and adultery; there is Nora Ephron and child abuse. It is no contest.”15
In this way, I find myself persuaded by Rachel Syme’s reading of Nora in The New Yorker:
“When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you,” Ephron once said. “But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh, so you become a hero rather than the victim of the joke.” Of course, that’s only the case if you are funnier in the telling than you are in the falling.”
Based on this reading, the novel can be viewed as an act of self-defence, a way to reclaim her own narrative. Was this tactic unpleasant or difficult for the people around her? I am sure. Was it difficult for her children once they grew up? Undoubtedly. But as Nora wrote in an introduction to my edition of Heartburn: “One of the things I’m proudest of is that I 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.“
(One other quick thing I love from Heartburn: As I teased last time, one of my absolute favourite Nora facts is that she immediately worked out that the “M.F.” in Bernstein’s reporting notes on Watergate stood for Mark Felt, and then proceeded to tell literally every person she knew about it. Was naming Carl’s character “Mark Feldman” another little hint to this? Who knows, but reading it always makes me laugh.)
Hollie: I was about halfway through Heartburn when I started thinking, very clearly: oh no. Oh no: I’m not falling passionately in love with this book. Oh no: I think maybe Heartburn is just fine, not brilliant. I took a break from reading to listen to a recent episode of the Longform podcast with Willa Paskin, a former TV critic and host of Decoder Ring. Paskin told interviewer Max Linsky that the job of a critic was to find something interesting to say about a piece of art.16 Oh no, I thought, I’m going to have to write about Heartburn, and I don’t think I have anything interesting to say!
The extent of my original review was: I think Heartburn is a well written, funny and well-observed book. I also think it’s a little thin.
That wouldn’t do. I fell back on a strategy that I used (many) times during my PhD: I read a bunch of things, started writing, and waited for my brain to catch up. As I was writing up my research into the contemporary reviews, I realised that I felt like I should be annoyed that writers were spending so much time talking about Nora’s personal life. As Marama writes in her review, women’s art is often dismissed as autobiography. I was certainly rolling my eyes at the glee with which some reviewers (mostly men) took in saying, obliquely or otherwise, that this was a petty revenge novel.
But, I realised, it would be pretty hypocritical to condemn these journalists for centring the autobiographical aspect of the book, given that we had made the editorial decision to open this edition of The Ephron-A-Thon with a mini-biography. What’s more, I found that the more I learned about Nora’s divorce, the more interesting I found Heartburn.
I’ve talked to enough English PhDs to understand that there is widespread disagreement about whether or not you should consider the context in which a novel is written, and we live in the age of Tumblr girlies talking about the ‘death of the author.’ But…I’m a historian, and I don’t think you can put aside the context, or decry people for reading Heartburn through the lens of Ephron’s life. I think that’s what Ephron wanted us to do! Though I imagine she occasionally regretted the decision—particularly during the 1983 press junket.17
Before I knew it, I’d formed the strong belief that you can’t account for the success and longevity of Heartburn without considering the novel’s seeming autobiographical inspiration. While the book has its charm, I simply cannot envisage a world in which Ephron releases this, sans public and dramatic divorce, and it has a remotely similar cultural impact. People read it then, and continue to read it now, because they want to know more about her.
I don’t know if I particularly found something interesting to say, but I will say that this process made me find Heartburn a much more interesting text. How did Heartburn help create—and maintain—the cult of Nora? How did Nora reckon with the success of Heartburn? How can we think about Heartburn as a persistent cultural touchstone? Those, to me, are interesting questions, and the type of thing I’m looking forward to continuing to think about as a Nora-newbie.
Up Next: Heartburn the movie (1986)
In April, we will be continuing our deep-dive into Heartburn. We’ll be watching and writing about the 1986 movie adaptation, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, and doing a round-up of of the forty-year anniversary essays and reflections.18 Hope to see you there!
I unfortunately haven’t been able to find this original article, because Liz Smith prematurely (and now infamously) announced Nora’s death before it actually occurred, and various hot takes on that series of events now bury everything else.
Via the Washington Post’s “Personalities” section in 1983: “Pocket Books believes there clearly is a bigger audience out there for a fictionalized account of the collapse of Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron’s marriage. The paperback publisher, in an extraordinarily tight money market, has paid an unusually high $341,000 for Ephron’ new novel “Heartburn.”
Rudy Maxa, “Bernstein: the Humpty Dumpty of Watergate,” The Bulletin 104 (5) (31 Jan 1984), 83; Maurice Dunlevy, “Writers’ World: Love, A Funny Thing However You Look At It,” The Canberra Times, 17 March 1984, 16.
Veronica Sen, “Nora Ephron’s Heartburn,” The Canberra Times, 25 November, 8.
According to the British Newspaper Archive which is not, tragically, free, there were six reviews of Heartburn published in 1983. Similar to Australia, there was a surge in interest after the film was released: my very academically rigorous search “Heartburn + Ephron” returned 18 results in 1986, and 74 in 1987 (before dropping back down to 2 in 1988).
Glenys Roberts, “It’s not my heart, it’s my poor ego,” Liverpool Daily Post, 9 August 1983, 7; “The tragedy of trivia,” Cambridge Daily news, 11 August 1983, 13.
Paul Connew, “Party,” Daily Mirror, 30 April 1983, 13.
I used ProQuest Historical Newspapers to track down most of the US reviews, which means I can’t include handy links: sorry! Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Books of The Times,” New York Times, 8 April 1983, Section C, 28; Grace Glueck, “Heartburn,” New York Times, 24 April 1983, BR3; Cheryl Lavin, “Story of ‘Heartburn’: Ephron’s novel life doesn’t go by book,” Chicago Tribune, 29 May 1983: A1; Michael Slung, “Book Report,” Washington Post, 15 May 1983: BW15; Jonathan Yardley, “A Taste of Bitters: Self-Mocking Satire of Fast-Track Ways,” Washington Post, 30 March 1983, B1.
Cyra McFadden, “Ephron cooks up a fine, funny first novel,” Chicago Tribune, April 7 1983.
I am disappointed but unsurprised to discover that Australian men are, once again, assuming a position of shame in the footnotes. Maurice Dunlevy, “Writers’ World: Love, A Funny Thing However You Look At It,” The Canberra Times, 17 March 1984, 16.
She told the Washington Post in 1983, “the truth is the sock drawer is only open about an inch. People may think they know about me, but it's really very similar to my essays. If you can do it at all, you give people the illusion of knowing you when all they really know is what you mean for them to know.”
And they remain obsessed. See this article from 2018 in The Cut: I Think About This a Lot: This Photo of Nora Ephron Looking Miserable While Another Woman Sits on Her Husband’s Lap.
Other articles felt even more personal, in part because of the insular nature of the media in this period. When one of Nora’s male acquaintances decided he wanted to interview her about Heartburn (or in his words, “I’d toss some questions to my friend, and she’d hit 2,000 words over the fence”) and she refused, he instead wrote a lengthy and negative article in New York. The same author later wrote an imagined “lunch” with Nora after her death, where (he dreamed) she cried over his article because he had “caught [her] in the act.” This whole thing was certainly A Choice.
Wiseltier wrote under the pseudonym Tristan Vox. The irony of a man writing anonymously to complain about a woman being too honest about her own life is…not lost on me.
See episode 523 of Longform, a consistently excellent interview podcast about writers and their process.
In her 1983 profile, Cheryl Lavin observed that Ephron is “relieved because she has just been promised that she is not going to be asked” whether Rachel Samstat is “really Nora Ephron.” (Lavin spends…a lot of time comparing Rachel and Nora in her review). In our previous newsletter on profiles, we learned that Nora thought pragmatically about money. I imagine the financial success of Heartburn made the bitter pill of media interviews easier to swallow!
And we will be talking about the absolutely appallingly-bad cover for the new 40th anniversary edition of Heartburn. Don’t think you got away with this, Stanley Tucci!