Nora Ephron’s Divorce Plot

In Nora Ephron’s only novel, Heartburn, the narrator, Rachel Samsat, leaves her first husband, Charlie (“a lunatic who kept hamsters”), after six years of marriage. Rachel’s divorce comes at a pivotal moment in second-wave feminism: “The women’s movement went away, and so, in many cases, did their wives. Their wives went out into the world, free at last, single again, and discovered the horrible truth: that they were sellers in a buyers’ market, and that the major concrete achievement of the women’s movement in the 1970s was the Dutch treat.” In the last gasps of their divorce proceedings, Rachel and Charlie quibble over furniture while a mover sits around reading “the vaginal section” of Our Bodies, Ourselves. The message is pretty clear: Women of the dinner-party set still weren’t having it all. That isn’t a new story, and Rachel is decidedly not on the front lines of social change. As she says about the 1960s, the decade before her first divorce: “I’m always interested when people talk about the sixties in the kind of hushed tone that is meant to connote the seriousness of it all, because what I remember about the sixties was that people were constantly looking up from dessert and saying things like, ‘Whose mousse is that?’” This all comes into play as Rachel reflects on how her life has already accommodated one bad marriage during the collapse of her second, which is what the novel is mainly about.