Heartburn, by Nora Ephron

I’ve known about this book forever, as I’ve known about all Nora Ephron’s work in books and movies, though the only book of hers I’ve ever read is her last one, I Remember Nothing. I believe Heartburn was her first book,, later turned into a movie, and is a not-at-all-thinly veiled roman a clef about the breakup of her second marriage after she learned of her husband’s affair.

Ephron had a very specific voice that is present in this lightly fictional work as well as in her non-fiction — an stylized, ironic, sometimes snarky manner of writing that for me, takes a bit of getting used but definitely won me over. As was the case when I read her writing about her own early life in I Remember Nothing and often is the case when I read novels or memoirs about women who came of age in the 1960s, it feels jarring to remember how recent that time was, when such unrealistic expectations were placed on women and such limitations were put around what they were allowed to be and achieve. Not that all the battles are one, and it’s possible (as we have seen in many places and maybe are seeing now) for ground once gained to be lost again … but it really is powerful to be reminded that not long ago, in an era that for women of my age was our mothers’ youth, smart and ambitious women really were taught that marriage was their most important job and that they would never be the equal of men in the workplace. That was the main thing I took away from Heartburn — a glimpse into a world that, while chronologically not that far in the past, feels ancient to me now.