Heartburn

Nora Ephron on love and loss, potatoes and capers

At the beach with Nora this weekend.

Until yesterday, I’d never read Heartburn by Nora Ephron. I know, I know, how is this possible when I love Nora Ephron, and food, and books, and humor, and crying tears of joy and pain at the same time? Heartburn is a book full of classic Nora wisdom, hilarity, grief, pain, and it’s also full of amazing recipes! It’s practically written for me, but somehow I’d never read it when it came out in the early 80s, and then it got lost to contemporary writers and more current fiction that occupies my nightstand stack. (Which right now contains The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Bramer, Take What You Need by Idra Novey, and Hello Beautiful, by Anna Napolitano. What’s on yours?) 

But last week, my mom called, and we were chatting about this and that—her new air fryer and when she might actually take it out of its box, how she didn’t get much sleep, how much she loved the Tony Awards this year—and she mentioned Heartburn and asked if I had read it. She said she thought I would love it.

Mom and I tend to love the same sort of books. She’s always been a reader, and took me to the Forest Hills Library in Queens from the time I was waddling around in diapers. We have been sharing book recommendations since Stephen King’s Carrie. We compare library hold lists and book recommendations, and tear out pages of the Book Review for each other. So the next time I went over to her apartment and she handed me the small paperback from the library, I took it and started reading. I barely put it down. 

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The book, as you may know, is fairly autobiographical, the story of Nora Ephron told through the character Rachel Samstat, 38, a New Yorker transplanted to DC when she marries Mark. She is a successful cookbook author and mother, who discovers that Mark has been having an affair. She learns this when they have a toddler and when she is quite pregnant with their second. 

The book takes us through her process — the sting, the humiliation, the grief, the fear of what comes next, the rage, the disbelief, all woven together with effortless humor and wit as only Nora can. Her observations are poignant and hilarious. This passage from the opening of Chapter Two is a perfect example: 

“One thing I have never understood is how to work it so that when you’re married things keep happening to you. Things happen to you when you are single. You meet new men. You travel alone, you learn new tricks, you read Trollope, you try sushi, you buy nightgowns, you shave your legs. Then you get married and the hair grows in. I love the everydayness of marriage. I love figuring out what’s for dinner and where to hang the pictures and do we owe the Richardsons, but life does tend to slow to a crawl. The whole summer Mark was secretly dating Thelma Rice while pretending to be at the dentist. I was cooking. That’s what I do for a living. And while I did discover a fairly revolutionary way to make a four-minute egg and had gotten to the point where I simply could not make a bad vinaigrette, this was not exactly the stuff of drama. (Even now I just cannot believe Mark would want to risk losing that vinaigrette. You just don’t bump into vinaigrettes that good.)”

I mean really? Who would risk the loss of a perfect vinaigrette? 

There’s another part of the book where she talks about what happens to a marriage when you have kids. Again, she nails it. 

“When you have a baby you set off an explosion inside your marriage and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different. All those idiotically lyrical articles about sharing child-rearing duties never mention that, nor do they allude to something else that happens when a baby is born, which is that all the power struggles of the marriage have a new playing field. The baby wakes up in the middle of the night, and instead of jumping out of bed you lie there thinking, Whose turn is it? If it’s your turn, you have to get up; if it’s his turn, then why is he still lying there asleep while you’re awake wondering whose turn it is. Now it takes TWO parents to feed the child; one to do it and one to keep the one who does it company. Now it takes two parents to take the child to the doctor: one who does it and one to keep the one who does it from becoming resentful about having to do it.”

YES, YES YES! (For more on this and other changes that occur during motherhood and marriage, please read Night Bitch by Rachel Yoder. FANTASTIC.) Yes, I was that person in the night when the baby would need to be fed, wondering, is it me again? I am doing all the diaper changing, waking, feeding? What has he done? There is a lot of indignation. This thing that happens, this score keeping. I am not proud of it. It sounds so petty, because it is, but it’s what happens when babies are born. 

She is also in love with our city, this beautiful place called New York, as am I. I grew up here, and hope to (eventually, not soon!) die here. I will never leave. So I loved this passage:

“I would walk into Balducci’s and there would be arugula and radicchio and fresh basil and sorrel and sugar snap peas and six kinds of sprouts and think to myself: even the vegetables in New York are better. It’s not just the vegetables of course. I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.” 

Dinner at Superiority Burger.

I feel that way too. Last night, walking home alone from the F train after a thrilling dinner at Superiority Burger with two fabulous girlfriends, I felt that sense of wonder at our beautiful city. This is what I love: the humid subway platform, full of puddles of rain that had somehow managed to drip through from an earlier thunderstorm. Waiting for the F, all of us waiting, and waiting, and more waiting with garbled unintelligible announcements overhead on the “PA” system: me with my head in my library book, sets of 20-somethings in various shades of gender fluidity and undress (bras are now tops, and shirts are now dresses and it seems no one really wears pants anymore?), singles swiping on their phones, couples groping, leaning into each other against the metal pillars, a few folks asleep or dozing or dreaming on the benches.

Then onto the train, rumbling under the river to Carroll Street, out into the hazy muggy night. The quiet of the damp streets, neighbors in pajamas walking dogs, a starless sky, a fragment of a moon. The warm smell of summer at night. I love coming home that way. Who would want to live somewhere you have to drive when you can take the F, even if it might actually be running on the D line or experiencing signal trouble?  

As I said at the start, the book is also a trove of wonderful recipes and random hilarious thoughts on food and cooking. For instance, she was hired by the “caper people” to create recipes using capers. This does not go well: "Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it tastes even better with capers not in it.”

The recipes in Heartburn are like characters in the story, so you won’t find them blocked out or typeset. They are stitched into the narrative, written as part of the story, as though Nora is your friend who knows how to cook really well, and she’s just chatting with you, and you’ve asked her how to make a particular dish, and she just tells you, simply. And then you take some notes, and go home and cook.  

The fabulous Nora Ephron (Getty Images)

If you like potatoes, there is an entire section devoted to them titled, “Potatoes and Love and Some Reflection,” that begins like this: “I have friends who begin with pasta, and friends who begin with rice, but whenever I fall in love I begin with potatoes. Sometimes meat and potatoes, sometimes fish and potatoes, but always potatoes. I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.” 

She actually travels the lifespan of a relationship in potatoes. There are crisp potatoes (the beginning of love), Potatoes Anna and Swiss Potatoes (the middle of love), and finally, mashed potatoes (the end of love): “Nothing like mashed potatoes when you are feeling blue…nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter.” She’s not wrong. 

Then there is her Linguine alla Cecca, a recipe she explains she got from a cook in Rome whom she persuaded to give it up. 

“As for the linguine alla cecca, it’s a hot pasta with a cold tomato and basil sauce and it's so light and delicate that it's almost like eating a salad. It has to be made in summer when tomatoes are fresh. Drop 5 large tomatoes into boiling water for one full minute. Peel and seed and chop. Put into a large bowl with ½ cup of olive oil, a garlic clove sliced in two, 1 cup fresh chopped basil leaves, salt and hot pepper flakes. Let sit for a couple of hours and then remove the garlic. Boil one pound of linguine, drain and toss with the cold tomato mixture. Serve immediately.”  

I’ll share one last part of the book that struck me before we go. This passage, about love. Rachel has just given birth to Nathaniel, the baby she was pregnant with when Mark reveals he has been sleeping with Thelma Rice. It was a complicated birth. Marvin, her obstetrician, has just removed her cesarean stitches, and when he’s through, he swipes an apple from her gift basket, and sits down to have a heart-to-heart. Rachel thinks he is going to ask her about postpartum depression but instead he says: “Do you believe in love?” 

“This is what I get for calling him by his first name,” thinks Rachel. And then she answers, in her mind, to us. 

“Sometimes I believe that love dies but hope springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that hope dies but love springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals love, and sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals good sex. Sometimes I believe that love is as natural as the tides, and sometimes I believe that love is an act of will. Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it. Sometimes I believe that love is essential, and sometimes I believe that the only reason love is essential is that otherwise you spend all your time looking for it.” 

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

I do too, Nora. I believe in love, even though I don’t believe it’s all sunsets, unicorns and rainbows. It can make you do wonderful beautiful things, and horrible horrible things, things you never thought you were capable of. Then again is that love or just being human? Both? I wish Nora were around to tell me what the answer is. But maybe she already has.