Heartburn

Heartburn is a novel by the American writer Nora Ephron, published in 1983 and her first work of fiction.

The narrator, Rachel Samstat, is a cookery writer in Washington whose husband, Mark, is a columnist, and she discovers that he is having an affair with a woman she knows at a dinner party where she is seated across from the other woman. The novel follows the months that come afterwards: the couple's attempts at therapy, the advice of friends, the food that Rachel cooks and the jokes she makes, which are the way the book keeps its balance. Ephron wrote it out of her own marriage to Carl Bernstein, and the resemblance was obvious enough at the time that the book was read as a public document as well as a novel. She later wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation, which appeared in 1986.

Ephron had been a journalist and an essayist before this, and the book was her first novel and the beginning of a second career writing for the screen.