Heartburn

"Well, funnily enough, I’ve only just read it. Which is ludicrous, because I love Nora Ephron’s screenplays. I mean, When Harry Met Sally is a film I could watch until the end of time. It’s the most perfect, perfect screenplay. But because I love Nora Ephron so much, I think I was worried I would be disappointed by the book. So I put off reading it for ages. What I love about it is what I love about her screenplays: it’s the casually-worn yet acute insight she has into the human condition—particularly the female condition—and the comedy with which she explores serious issues. She talks about this in the prologue of the new edition, and makes the point that John Updike was forever writing about unhappy marriages not unlike his own. He was never accused of writing a ‘thinly-veiled autobiographical novel.’ This seems to be something firmly laid at the feet of female authors. I thought that was so interesting. I do think that’s true. “She seems to be writing whatever the fuck she wants to write, and I like that” There’s still this perception that female authors can’t gaze beyond their own navel. They have to take everything from their own lives. It’s almost as if male critics are accusing them of suffering from a collective lack of imagination. And nothing could be further from the truth. So I like the fact that she tackles that. In writing a novel loosely based on some of her own experiences, she actually plays with the form of the novel in quite a sophisticated way. There isn’t really a conventional plot to it. It’s a just a series of comic interludes and insights, interspersed with recipes. Yet there is something very heart-warming about something that calls itself Heartburn . I found myself more intrigued than I thought I was going to be because of that. She seems to be writing whatever the fuck she wants to write, and I really like that. Absolutely. Because it’s about a woman claiming her own narrative. Nora Ephron wrote Heartburn in 1983, but I think that that’s still enormously important in the current political climate. Particularly given that the man that Nora Ephron was married to in real life was a journalist, and therefore had control of all sorts of narratives. In the book, the protagonist talks a lot about her husband—this columnist—stealing stuff that she said for his column. So it’s a literal reacquisition of the narrative she is owed. I do love that, because ultimately it’s what we’ve just been talking about. That in the failure of this particular marriage, this female protagonist is finding her own strength and her own voice. That’s why I love it."

"I think it is very empowering. She goes through all this terrible stuff, then at the end [spoiler alert:] she shoves a cake in her husband’s face. It’s all about her coming up. It’s really important to have humour. Heartburn isn’t strictly a book about depression. It’s a book about heartbreak and failing marriage and all that stuff. But what I really like about it is that it is really very funny—horrible things are happening to her, but it’s very funny—and it is really important to find humour in the bleakest of moments, wherever possible. Certainly, when I was writing Mad Girl , I didn’t want it to be a misery memoir. There’s a hundred billion misery memoirs out there, but what I wanted this to be was an upbeat book about depression, and it’s perfectly possible to do that. Again, it’s about taking control over what’s in your head. Everyone loves Heartburn, don’t they? No one who’s read Heartburn hasn’t been like: ‘I love Nora Ephron, and what the hell was Carl Bernstein thinking?’ She takes something really negative and turns it into a massive positive, and I think that’s fucking awesome. And she makes everyone laugh along the way, and I think that’s what writing should really be about. These terrible things happen to all of us, so why don’t we all just get together and laugh collectively about them. You can cry about them too! It’s like when you’re with a girlfriend who has just broken up with her boyfriend. She’s crying, but then you start joking about how awful he was, or that thing he did: and wasn’t he really a total douchebag? It’s a very human thing, trying to find humour in the depths of despair, and it is always there. It is always there. It’s almost a hysteria, isn’t it? But also on a very practical level, it is a lovely cookbook . I just think it is the most charming, engaging, funny, lovely, edible book. It is an edible book in more ways than one. I think it gives hope. Hope is really important, when you are going through something like a heartbreak or a divorce. I’m in no way as good a writer as Nora Ephron, but I’m definitely trying to capture that tone which is definitely something very inspiring."