What's more, I am not and have never been a food writer. The world I live in is filled with ravenous writers looking for material, and you have to move quickly if you want to write about even your own life, much less someone else's.
My therapy group, for instance, was never robbed at gunpoint, but I had a friend whose group was, and the minute she told me the story I stashed it in my "Use This Someday" file and hoped I would be the first person to take advantage of what seemed to me just the sort of comic, slightly public episode that was destined to be used by someone, sooner rather than later.
On the other hand, most of the characters in Heartburn are entirely fictional, and many of the things that happen in the book didn't happen at all. The unbelievably tall person he had the affair with remained unbelievably tall it's my experience as a novelist that some things lose everything if they are disguised, even thinly, and that therefore it's best to just leave them alone. In the book, I thinly disguised myself by making myself considerably more composed than I was at the time, and I thinly disguised my ex-husband by giving him a beard that belonged to one of my friends. My second marriage in fact ended exactly the way the one in Heartburn does, shortly after I discovered that my husband was having an affair with an unbelievably tall person. Let's face it, Philip Roth and John Updike picked away at the carcasses of their early marriages in book after book, but to the best of my knowledge they were never hit with the "thinly disguised" thing.īut as I was saying, I have no real quarrel with this description. I have no real quarrel with this description, even though I've noticed, over the years, that the words "thinly disguised" are applied mostly to books written by women. Heartburn is a sinfully delicious novel, as soul-satisfying as mashed potatoes and as airy as a perfect soufflé.It's been nearly 25 years since my second marriage ended, and 22 since I finished writing Heartburn, which is often referred to as a thinly disguised novel. And in between trying to win Mark back and loudly wishing him dead, Ephron's irrepressible heroine offers some of her favorite recipes. Food sometimes is, though, since Rachel writes cookbooks for a living. The fact that the other woman has "a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs" is no consolation.
Seven months into her pregnancy, Rachel Samstat discovers that her husband, Mark, is in love with another woman. For in this inspired confection of adultery, revenge, group therapy, and pot roast, the creator of Sleepless in Seattle reminds us that comedy depends on anguish as surely as a proper gravy depends on flour and butter. S it possible to write a sidesplitting novel about the breakup of the perfect marriage? If the writer is Nora Ephron, the answer is a resounding yes. Genre: Family & Relationships,Books,Nonfiction,.
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