Heartburn is famously about the dissolution of Ephron’s marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein, who was still riding the crest of fame for his Washington Post coverage of Watergate. Rachel then smacks Mark with a pie in the kisser, a slapstick fallback updated for the Reagan era. Rachel counts modest coup on her by circulating a rumor that Thelma Rice has an improbably contracted STD. Soon Mark is back with the woman with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb, immediately recognizable in the real-life Washington of the day. Mark is slow in coming around, but soon he’s professing his loyalty to Rachel once morewhich, Rachel rightly suspects, is a pathetic maneuver to win her back for appearance’s sake.

all the time, but Mark’s timing is particularly graceless, since his wife, Rachel Samstat, is seven months pregnant and, as she laments three sentences in, can’t even date. Rachel, a cookbook author of some renown and, like Ephron, a foodie avant la lettre, splits for New York to consider her options. He is an idol, though an idol with feet of clayor, Nora Ephron tells us, feet of roman à clef.įrom the opening sentences of Ephron’s 1983 novel Heartburn, we know that Mark is having an affair, one that involves social climbing up the preternaturally tall wife of a hapless diplomat. He has a syndicated column, appears regularly on the Sunday morning talk shows, knows his way around an oyster fork and a champagne glass. Mark Feldman is a fellow the nation’s capital cannot do without, a master interpreter of bizarre remarks encompassing Washington and sex and of the hidden political currents that flow through the District of Columbia.

Thelma rice nora ephron