Summing up the whole mess

“Heartburn. That, it seemed to me as I lay in bed, was what I was suffering from. That summed up the whole mess: heartburn. Compound heartburn. Double-digit heartburn. Terminal heartburn. The tears poured from my eyes as I lit on the image, and the only thing that might have made it even more satisfyingly melodramatic and masochistic would have been to be lying in the bathtub; nothing like crying in the tub for real self-pity, nothing like the moment when every last bit of you is wet, and wiping the tears from your eyes only means making your face even wetter.” Nora Ephron, Heartburn.

As I was scrabbling in the attic last Thursday night, looking for my old copy of Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy to read to the kids at bedtime, I stumbled across a thin, yellowing paperback by Nora Ephron called Heartburn.

I literally inhaled it over the next couple of days. I read it to relax before bed and I read it to fill the hours after I woke up at 4.30am.

Being a mere 223 pages, it didn’t last long.

But I adored it while it did. It was like talking to a very funny friend. It makes me want to write a book of my own.

I might need to watch the movie again too … I have a bit of a soft spot for Jack Nicholson. And Meryl. And a super-young Jeff Daniels.

Nora Ephron was a pretty amazing woman. Huffington Post describes her as a “filmmaker, director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, playwright, journalist, author, blogger and HuffPost Contributing Editor. She is the author of “Crazy Salad,” “Heartburn,” “Wallflower at the Orgy,” and “Scribble Scribble.” She received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay for “When Harry Met Sally,” “Silkwood,” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” which she also directed.”

Heartburn was Nora’s first novel. It was loosely based on her divorce from her second husband, journalist Carl Bernstein (yep, the Watergate bloke). Carl got very upset about Nora writing Heartburn. He thought their private life should be kept private. She ignored him.

There were downsides to her divorce …

Nora wrote in her book  I REMEMBER NOTHING: And Other Reflections:

I can’t think of anything good about divorce as far as the children are concerned. You can’t kid yourself about that, although many people do. They say things like, “It’s better for children not to grow up with their parents in an unhappy marriage.” But unless the par­ents are beating each other up, or abusing the children, kids are better off if their parents are together. Chil­dren are much too young to shuttle between houses. They’re too young to handle the idea that the two peo­ple they love most in the world don’t love each other anymore, if they ever did. They’re too young to under­stand that all the wishful thinking in the world won’t bring their parents back together. And the newfangled rigmarole of joint custody doesn’t do anything to ease the cold reality: in order to see one parent, the divorced child must walk out on the other.

And there were upsides … Heartburn spent eight months on the New York Times Bestseller list and bankrolled her new life, post divorce, with her two young children.

As Nora revealed: “I survived. My religion is Get Over It. I turned it into a rollicking story. I wrote a novel. I bought a house with the money from the novel.”

When Nora died in 2012, much was mulled over about the messages in her work.

Virginia Heffernan recalled her mother’s favourite moment from Heartburn, when the main character, Rachel, decides her marriage is over and slams a key lime pie in her cheating hubby’s face.

“She bequeathed Ephron’s words to me like something from the Tao Te Ching. ‘If I throw this pie at him, he will never love me. But he doesn’t love me anyway. So I can throw the pie if I want to.’

 “What happens when women stop trying to make men love them? A curiosity about this intriguing phenomenon was at plainly the heart of Ephron’s work, and the answer was equally clear: Life begins.

“You throw the pie. And then, as she recounted recently in I Remember Nothing, things start working out. Your husband leaves. You fall in real love. Your kids thrive. The pain recedes. And things become interesting again, and then much more interesting, and then yachts are involved, and it’s rewarding beyond your wildest dreams, and funny.”

I don’t need yachts. But things becoming rewarding beyond my wildest dreams … and funny … sounds pretty awesome.

Song of the day: Carly Simon “Coming Around Again”