This may be a story of marital infidelity, but it is far from a somber one from tragedy, Ephron mines high comedy, creating a narrative that is riotously funny.
The first-person narrative reads like a long comedic soliloquy, and it’s a real treat to be privy to Rachel’s zany, slightly manic internal monologue. The story centers around Rachel’s discovery, while seven months pregnant with her second child, that her husband Mark is having an affair. Heartburn is a roman à clef based on Ephron’s high-profile relationship with Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein), her husband of four years. Of course, “New York” is often a code for “Jewish.” As Heartburn’s protagonist, Rachel Samstat, says, calling someone “too New York” “is a cute way of being anti-Semitic, but who cares? I’d rather be too New York than too anything else.” And indeed, Rachel’s story is decidedly Jewish, from her observations about Washington, D.C.’s goyishness (“Listen, even the Jews there are sort of Gentile”), to her hypothesizing about the Jewish princess stereotype (“I’ve always believed that the concept of the Jewish princess was invented by a Jewish prince who couldn’t get his wife to fetch him the butter”), to her therapist who tells jokes about kreplach and stories set in Vilna, Kiev, and Minsk to illustrate psychological dynamics (“There’s no real way to convey what she does in her office that doesn’t sound like some sort of Yiddish mumbo jumbo”). Her first novel, Heartburn (1983), shares many of these films’ best attributes: strong women characters, a perfect blend of levity and pathos, and a specifically New York sensibility. Nora Ephron is perhaps best known for her romantic comedy films, such as You’ve Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally.
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