Nora Ephron’s ‘Heartburn,’ 40 Years In

In 1983, Nora Ephron published Heartburn, a roman à clef about the end of her marriage to the journalist Carl Bernstein. The book — Ephron’s first and only novel — was a best-seller. It spawned a 1986 film adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson and, indirectly, the Nora Ephron Movie, a subgenre of romantic comedy characterized by urbane wit and moderate neurosis. Heartburn also presaged the 21st century’s predominate strain of food memoir: plucky but vulnerable, confessional but conversational, most often written by a white woman, and interspersed with recipes that each serve to reflect or illuminate a particular person, memory, or juncture in the writer’s life. Although Ephron was never a food writer, her protagonist, Rachel Samstat, is, and Rachel’s account of her husband’s affair — which she discovers when she’s seven months pregnant — and the subsequent implosion of her marriage is punctuated by 15 recipes, three of which are for potatoes.