Heartburn

Ephron’s Heartburn is a celebrated example of a roman à clef (“novel with a key”), a novel in which real people and events appear under fictional names. The genre is nearly as old as the modern novel itself, dating back to 17th-century France; Madeleine de Scudéry is often credited as pioneering the form with “historical” romances that in fact took their cues from the high society of Scudéry’s own day. Writers have found the genre attractive for various reasons, not the least of which is the plausible deniability it affords. For instance, Mary Shelley drew heavily on her own circle of friends when creating the characters that populate The Last Man but does not reference them by name—possibly because her father-in-law had forbidden her from penning a direct biography of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Pabst-Kastner, Charlotte. “A Biographical Sketch of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851).” Victorian Web). The genre also gives writers greater leeway for invention than narrative nonfiction. Many romans à clef are acclaimed works of literature, including Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

Heartburn fuses the roman à clef template with a few unconventional formal choices. Its plot is a thinly veiled account of the painful and public disintegration of Ephron’s marriage to Carl Bernstein, a star journalist of the Watergate scandal. The fictional Mark Feldman is Bernstein, and his lover, Thelma Rice, is based on Margaret Jay, the wife of the British ambassador to the United States, with whom Bernstein had an affair while Ephron was pregnant. The high-profile nature of the participants made the real-life drama a subject of intense media gossip, a humiliating experience that Ephron channels into Rachel’s biting narration, demonstrating that “writing well is the best revenge” (i). Ephron’s background as a journalist and essayist directly shaped the novel’s sharp, confessional style. More uniquely, her parallel career as a food writer and cookbook author is woven into the book’s very structure. The inclusion of recipes is not merely a stylistic quirk; it supports the work’s themes. Amid the chaos of betrayal, cooking offers Rachel a measure of stability and control. As she reflects, the methodical process of following a recipe is “a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure” (133). This blending of fiction, memoir, and cookbook is a direct product of Ephron’s life, transforming her personal trauma into a unique literary form that finds solace and order in the domestic arts.