Heartburn by Nora Ephron

I sat on the banks of the Ganges and I laughed.

I sat in one of the world’s oldest constantly inhabited cities, containing one of the world’s major religion’s most holy sites, overlooking this sacred river, downriver from the iconic spot where fires burn human cremations around the clock, and I was laughing.

Thousands of miles from my problems and my own life, both so far away, I finally felt able to laugh again. To giggle, to titter, to chuckle, to snigger…to guffaw, to rofl, to lol… to laff.

And what lifted my soul to such a height of ecstasy that the sound of joy must burst forth from between my dry, full, lips?

Was it an ecstasy borne from that mere distance from my stultifying day to day? Was it the energy of Benares lifting my corrupt Western soul, freeing it from harrowing and unsettling context? Was it a permanent change, a shift into hope and positivity and belief and faith in a future preferable to my present and my past?

No.

No.

No.

It was none of these things.

It was Nora Ephron’s 1983 tower of force debut (and only!) novel, Heartburn.

Yes, it’s a little racist.

Yes, its class politics are pretty bad.

Yes, it’s also homophobic (and very heteronormative) and arguably ableist and frequently mocks people based on their appearance and, yes, it trades in and on stereotypes and its food writer protagonist has a taste in food basically below that of a contemporary child who’s even slightly middle class, but all of this means is that…

Heartburn is from the bloody eighties!!!

It’s a comedy novel about affairs and shagging in the American middle class of the 1980s!

Of course it’s a little bit bigoted!!! And to judge it because of that, well…… wouldn’t that be a little bit bigoted, too????

As a period piece, it’s phenomenal in its detail of dull suburban middle class life in early ’80s East Coast United States…

As a period piece packed with jokes – yes, many of which you or I wouldn’t repeat or retell now, of course – it’s a rip-roaring gag a minute farce.

Is it like an American jaded Jilly Cooper? Kinda, but less erotic and much much funnier… Funnier enough to get away with how much less erotic it is, even though it’s all about sex lol.

Is it perfect?

I won’t answer that, but I will tell you that it’s the perfect 1980s American comedy novel about marriage in upper middle class America. If that sounds like a potentially perfect novel to you, then maybe it fucking is!

Recommended. Yes.

Have a laugh.

Have a live laugh love moment like I did, tittering in Varanasi.