In Heartburn, her character is famously skewered as: 'a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb.'Įveryone who's read Heartburn or seen the movie - with Meryl Streep playing Ephron's fictional alter ego, cookbook author Rachel Samstat - remembers the climactic dinner party scene where Rachel throws a key lime pie at the face of her cheating husband. The year was 1979 and Ephron was pregnant with the couple's second child when she discovered Bernstein was having an affair with Margaret Jay, the then-wife of the then-British ambassador. When such a beloved writer's voice is stilled, you really do feel more alone, less armored against the world. For those who don't know the novel, Heartburn takes place mostly in an elite Washington, D.C., world of journalists and politicians and is a roman à clef about the break-up of Ephron's marriage to reporter Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame. Some of its jokes haven't aged well, such as wisecracks about lesbians and Japanese men with cameras, but the pain that underlies its humor is as fresh as a paper cut. I've read Heartburn three times since it came out in 1983. It's sentimental to say so, but when such a beloved writer's voice is stilled, you really do feel more alone, less armored against the world.

We didn't have to tick off all the ways we needed Ephron's tough wit to help us through things. My friend and I locked eyes over our margaritas and nodded. ' I'm so pissed off,' this friend said, echoing Meryl Streep's words at Ephron's memorial service in 2012.

I met a good friend for dinner the other night and told her I was rereading Nora Ephron's novel, Heartburn, which has just come out in a 40 th anniversary edition.

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