Threaded through the whole are recipes and anecdotes which drive the story along and humanize our heroine. The book wittily describes the life of an upper middle class intellectual couple replete with neuroses-Rachel is in group therapy, Mark agonizes over where his socks go. They have one daughter and Rachel is pregnant with their second child as the book begins. Rachel is a Jewish New Yorker who has moved to Washington, D.C., to support her husband's career.

The narrator of the novel is Rachel Samstat, a food writer who is married to Mark Feldman, a political journalist. It is Nora Ephron's first published novel but in it she mentions subjects that she would go on to feature in future work such as When Harry Met Sally and Julie & Julia. Its strong autobiographical content provides insight into one of the 'power couples' of the late 1970s. The novel is a vivid depiction of the breakdown of a marriage. Ephron also wrote the screenplay for the film based on the novel starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. Originally published in 1983, the novel largely focuses on his affair with Margaret Jay, the daughter of former British Prime Minister James Callaghan. PART OF THE VIRAGO DESIGNER COLLECTION.Heartburn is an autobiographical novel based on Nora Ephron's life story about her marriage to and divorce from Carl Bernstein, her second husband. 'It is snortingly funny in its depiction of the death throes of a relationship. This is Nora Ephron's (screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle) roman a clef: 'I always thought during the pain of the marriage that one day it would make a funny book,' she once said. Heartburn is a roller coaster of love, betrayal, loss and most satisfyingly revenge. Food sometimes is, though, since Rachel is a cookery writer, and between trying to win Mark back and wishing him dead, she offers us some of her favourite recipes.

The fact that this woman has a 'neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb' is no consolation. Seven months into her pregnancy, Rachel discovers that her husband is in love with another woman. 'I kept a copy of Nora Ephron's Heartburn next to me as a reminder of how to be funny and truthful, and all I ended up doing was ignoring my writing and rereading Heartburn' AMY POEHLER Heartburn is the perfect, bittersweet, sobbingly funny, all-too-true confessional novel' NIGELLA LAWSON 'I have bought more copies of this book to give to people, in a frenzy of enthusiasm, than any other. 40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, WITH A FOREWORD BY STANLEY TUCCI

Heartburn novel