It’s a short book, fun and maudlin and vicious, with recipes interspersed in the text here and there in a way that actually sort of works, though after a while the endlessness of Rachel’s misery begins to wear a reader down. The plot is low-stakes parlor drama-infidelity, family secrets, drunken marriage proposals, a little bit of genteel disorderly conduct. Now everything in Rachel’s life is exploding in slow motion.
She’s recently become aware that her husband (“a fairly short person”) is not only having an affair with a woman in their social set (“a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed”) but had the audacity to fall in love with her.
The narrator, Rachel Samstat, is a food writer and cookbook author in her late thirties, seven months pregnant with her second child. I can admit, with only a mild quaver in my voice, that although “ Heartburn”-Nora Ephron’s novel, from 1983, a fictionalization of the end of her marriage to the philandering journalist Carl Bernstein-is good, often great, with moments of real dazzle and zing, it’s maybe not the very best work in the vast Ephron œuvre.
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