Whether you’re in Brooklyn or Brockley, Heartburn is an all too human declaration of gustatory independence. In Heartburn’s case, revenge is a dish best served in the guise of a four-minute egg, and it is all the better for it. A deep, steaming bowl of linguine alla cecca or fresh-out-the-oven slice of a perfectly done peach pie might not make up for watching a marriage crash against adultery’s rocky shores, but for Rachel, and the reader, it’s a start. With time, patience, the right ingredients, and a little skill, you can have whatever you so desire. But she also has the fixity of food to show that, every so often, following a recipe serves you well. Rachel, like you, like me, has made mistakes, has regrets. Mistakes are something the cook tries their hardest to avoid, which is why cooking is craft, not art, but life tends to happen outside of the kitchen, and that is where mistakes are an all too regular occurance. The story of a relationship is a story of food: the gleaming white plate spattered with plump scarlett prawns eaten under a bright Basque moon in the first flushes of love, a pollo ad astra huffed in queasily uneasy silence in a Central London PizzaExpress at the exact moment you have accept the doomed and dismal reality of your situation. Now, at the risk of saying something obvious to the point of being idiotic, food and romance are the same thing. Rachel gives us recipes for mashed potato, sorrel soup, and bread pudding.

Rachel eats shrimp curry, chicken stuffed with lemons, and Uncle Seymour’s beef borscht. It practically calls out for a languorous afternoon in the park. Heartburn yearns to be read in a single sitting. Thelma has “a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb,” and makes puddings that Rachel describes as “gluey.” Mark has an affair with Thelma, the wife of a government official. Rachel, a food writer, is married to Mark, a political journalist.

Revenge, and near-perfection, respectively.Ī semi-autobiographical, bittersweet comic masterpiece about infidelity, neurosis, and pregnancy, Heartburn is a book that yearns to be read in a single sitting. What, then, drove Nora Ephron-journalist, screenwriter, director-to write such a book? And why, 35 years on from its publication and its later adaption into a film starring Meryl Streep, does this novel about high(ish) American society still sing as sweetly as a roasted shoulder of lamb on a Sunday afternoon?

Heartburn novel