139. Nora Ephron’s Heartburn Turns 40

KIM: Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Kim Askew here with my co-host, Amy Helmes.

AMY: Hey, everyone!

KIM: Last week we discussed the author Ursula Parrott, whose 1929 bestselling debut novel helped make the word “ex-wife” a part of our vernacular.

AMY: Yes, her novel tackled the topic of divorce with frankness and humor. Many wry novels about divorce have followed Parrott’s ex-wife, including one which celebrates its 40th anniversary later this month: Nora Ephron’s Heartburn.

KIM: And yeah, Nora Ephron is certainly no lost lady. She’s known not just for her books, but for films like When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail. I mean, iconic movies.

AMY: Yeah, obviously I’ve seen those movies, but prior to this episode I had never actually read Heartburn. OR seen the movie based on the book.

KIM: Oh my God. I can't believe that! It's such a good book and such a fun movie to watch when you've read the book. I mean, yeah. Well, I'm sure we'll be talking about it all, but yeah, I'm glad that you've now rectified that horrible omission in your, um, reading.

AMY:  You know, I saw a newspaper article saying it was the 40th anniversary, and I was like, “Oh God, I never read that.” And when I started reading it, I was like, “What on earth? This is so good. I love it. What the hell?” But I think I know maybe why I hadn't read it. And that is, you know, it came out in 1983, so I was in elementary school. I'm part of the Gen X generation. The last thing that would appeal to me in previous decades would be reading some quote unquote “old lady” book. And that's what it always sounded like to me, was just like this “old lady” book, like a, a book for women named Darlene who goes to Tupperware parties, drinks chablis and sells Mary Kay. I was wrong. I was wrong.  And honestly too, they say don't judge a book by its cover. But if you look up the covers of heartburn over the years, it's never… the covers are always a little cheesy.

KIM: Yeah. Maybe we should post some, to go along with this episode so that we can, we can show maybe  where Amy got this idea about Darlene and her Tupperware parties. You know what, this makes me think of one of the people on my team at work. He's in his twenties. He and his friend have a podcast about  costumes and they watched The Matrix for the first time and they thought it was going to be like Men in Black. They had no idea, like, the depth of the story. They saw some stills and they thought, “Oh, that's just a dumb action movie.” And then they watched it and their minds were absolutely blown. So anyway, how did I bring The Matrix into this?

I don't know. Anyway.

AMY: And I, because I just dismissed it,  I didn't know anything about it.  I kind of knew that it had been a movie. I thought it was just  a book  for menopausal women or something. Um, but then when I'm reading this article about the 40th anniversary of the book, it mentions that it was based on Ephron's own divorce from Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. And that, like the character in the book, Ephron was seven months pregnant with their second child when this divorce took place. So that caught my attention.

KIM: Yeah. You're like, this is not what I thought!

AMY: Yeah. I was like, well, this is interesting. And I never realized that this book featured recipes throughout it.

KIM: What?!

AMY: I didn't know! I didn't know it was about food. Um, so, you know, basically I'm now of the age of the chablis-swilling Tupperware lady. So I guess finally the time had come for me to read it and I loved it!

KIM: It’s all coming together, right?

AMY: They say a book comes to you at the time you're supposed to have it come to you. But I mean, I would've loved this book in my twenties.

I just never gave it a try.

KIM: I mean, we've compared things to like,  Lena Dunham's Girls and Sex and the City and stuff like that.  I feel like this is like that too. 

AMY: It is, it's a New York City…. Hilarious. Super witty. it's been a while since I've read a book where almost every page has multiple laugh out loud moments. You know, this book has it. And I thought maybe the humor would be corny, but she's just savage. 

KIM: Yeah, there’s a line from the book that kind of sums it all up. Rachel (the main character’s) therapist asks Rachel why she turns everything into a funny story, and she answers: “Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much. Because if I can tell the story, I can get on with it.” 

AMY: Yeah. And, and it's so great and so true that, you know, this book was Ephron's way to get her power back. It's what launched her into this successful career. Success is the best revenge, isn't that what they say?

KIM: Absolutely. And I’m sure a lot of our readers are familiar with the book, but would you want to read any other passages from the book?

AMY: Yeah, sure. I was looking through trying to find my favorite funny passage, but then I remembered this section, and it reminded me a lot of Ursula Parrott. So like Parrott, Ephron takes an opportunity in this section to make an observation about the situation for married women (and divorced women) in the 1970s. 

There have always been many things you can do short of actually ending a bad marriage — buying a house, having an affair and having a baby are the most common, I suppose — but in the early 1970s there were at least two more. You could go into consciousness raising and spend an evening a week talking over cheese to seven other women whose marriages were equally unhappy. And you could sit down with your husband and thrash everything out in a wildly irrelevant fashion by drawing up a list of household duties and dividing them up all over again. This happened in thousands of households, with identical results: thousands of husbands agreed to clear the table. They cleared the table. They cleared the table and then looked around as if they deserved a medal. They cleared the table and then hoped they would never again be asked to do another thing. They cleared the table and hoped the whole thing would go away. And it did. The women’s movement went away, and so, in many cases, did their wives. Their wives went out into the world, free at last, single again, and discovered the horrible truth: that they were sellers in a buyer’s market, and that the major concrete achievement of the women’s movement in the 1970s was the Dutch treat.

KIM: And that is why this book is like Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife for the 1970s, right there.

AMY: Ursula Parrott, Jr., you know, for the next [generation] or whatever.

KIM: Yeah. What is really happening? How is the, the so-called feminist movement  really impacting real women in their lives? And I'm giving you a hard time about not having read this,  novel, but obviously I'm playing it up for fun.

It happens to both of us all the time. Anyway. It is kind of funny how she also incorporates recipes throughout the novel.  It's almost like Julia and Julia or whatever.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: Yeah, Um, and we've done a, a few other books with recipes on this show. I'm thinking Peg Bracken and MFK Fisher, and I feel like Peg Bracken is good one to mention in relation to what we're talking about.

AMY: Yeah, given the time frame this was written,  was kind of worried that these recipes would be very peg bracken, like, which means open up a can of cream of mushroom soup and dump it in with a packet of onion soup mix. Um, lots of sodium, 

KIM: Yeah, you’re like, “What’s it gonna be?” Amy and I were hoping to pull off a “Heartburn” themed potluck dinner party in time for this episode, but we didn’t end up having enough time.

AMY: Yeah, I, I really wanted it to run after Ursula La Parrot  but, um, we, we couldn't get our acting gear for having a full on dinner party. So I wound up, letting my family once again be taste testers for some of the recipes in this book.

KIM: I can’t wait to hear them.

[Amy plays snippets from dinner table.]

KIM: Cute. Very cute. I love it. Oh my God, you're family. They're just always so sweet. It's a good thing your marriage isn't relying on dressing though. I didn't think the enthusiasm was enough.

AMY: I will say  the dressing's pretty basic and she doesn't give the dressing recipe until the very end of the book,  it's just Dijon mustard, red wine vinegar, and olive oil.  And I thought  her proportions was way too mustardy. So in the future, I will make it again, but I would just do much less of the Grey Poupon.  and I also want to say that that dressing and the fact that she's like, “Oh, for sure my husband won't leave me because he doesn't know the salad dressing recipe.” It reminds me of a real-life gossip story about Olivia Wild and Jason Sudeikis.  

KIM: Oh yeah. Oh, and the salad. That was for, who was the salad for?  Harry Styles or something? She was taking him a salad. I don't know. I mean, I don't know any of these people. 

AMY: If you Google it, you'll find something about the salad dressing and, but, so anyway, the salad dressing in this book made me think of that.

KIM: It involves someone in like trying to stand behind a car so it couldn't pack out of a driveway. I mean it, I mean the salad 

thing really it is Heartburn!

AMY: So maybe there’s something to it!

KIM: Yeah. But also the lima bean and per casserole. Yuck.

AMY: Oh, yeah. I know. That's one of the recipes that I did not make.

KIM: I hate lima beans, first of all… 

AMY: Yeah, I don't think I would eat that. If we would've had the potluck dinner with friends, I would've had somebody bring it just for fun, because it's so crazy. Listener, somebody out there needs to have a Heartburn potluck! It's such a fun theme for a dinner party. 

KIM: We should still do the dinner party!

AMY: Right. All right. We'll…

KIM: Everything doesn’t have to be for the podcast.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: Yeah. Okay. Wait, so let's talk about the movie adaptation. It's starred Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. So what did you think about the movie, Amy?

AMY: I didn’t fully watch it.

KIM: That’s saying something right there. 

AMY: YouTube has like, the famous clips,  I, I watched like, maybe six of the famous scenes from the movie, like snippets. Here's the thing. I love Meryl Streep as an entity. She, to me, was not my ideal Rachel. And I just find when she's in a movie, she is so distracting to me. Like her cheekbones are mesmerizing. So like I spend more time looking at her cheekbones…

KIM: It's an aesthetic movie. I mean, I didn't feel like the characters from the book to me, Jack Nicholson didn't either. I mean…

AMY: No, it didn’t feel like the right casting.

KIM: Yeah, we're not of the right, we're not the right audience for Jack Nicholson. Because I realize women probably thought he was like the best thing ever, but we don't…

AMY: Watching those snippets, I was like, “I think I’ve seen enough.”

KIM: I mean as, I mean, just to say Jack Nicholson, not as a sex symbol. Anyway, go ahead. For us, anyway…

AMY: I thought he was kind of sexy in his day.

KIM: Yeah. I guess he was in his day. I just don't know. Yeah. Anyway.

AMY: I feel like we’re getting off on a tangent.

KIM: Okay. Go ahead.

AMY: This movie though, received some pretty sexist backlash when it came out. Um, Nora Ephron took some heat  for the fact that this got turned into a movie, um, a guy Tristan Vox, wrote about it in Vanity Fair he basically said that, whatever Bernstein's affair, any harm that caused the family Ephron's tell-all about it was far more damaging. You know, just like she had a responsibility toward her children to sort of take the high road and to, you know, not air all this to the public..

KIM: Yeah, I'm sorry, but as if he had no part in creating the circus. I mean, his affair sparked the book. 

AMY: It was part of their actual divorce agreement. There was a stipulation that Bernstein would be allowed to meet with Mike Nichols, is that the 

director, um, and view an early cut of the film and that a share of the prophets from the film should be placed in a trust for their children.

Which I guess that's fine, but to be like, I need to be able to see, you know..

KIM: I don't know. That's her art. She made it after he split up with her. I mean,  how does he get to say how she spends the money she makes from it?

AMY: Yeah. After their divorce, he said of the movie that it “continues the tasteless exploitation and public circus Nora has made out of our lives.” Nora has made?! Nora has made?! How is she the bad guy? Because he cheated on her and all she did was chronicle it?

KIM: Yeah. I mean, she brought it out in her art. She used it in her art. Good for her.

AMY: Yeah. Anyway, listeners, if you're like me and you never gave heartburn a read, go read it.   Penguin Random House is putting out a new, um, addition of it with a forward or introduction by Stanley Tucci, which is interesting, I guess the food connection there. Anyway, That's all for today's episode.  If you like what we're doing, head over to wherever you're listening and give us a five star review of this podcast. It really, really helps.

KIM: Yeah. We got one the other day and we were texting each other with wild excitement.

AMY: Oh my gosh, you guys, you don't know how  we react to your amazing reviews, so, please do that and, head over to our Facebook forum where we're having all kinds of fun conversations with listeners and former guests. And, uh, we'll see you next week for another lost lady. 

KIM: Our theme song is performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo is designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.

AMY: So this movie received some pretty sexist backlash when it came out. (see below)

[paraphrase]

Tristan Vox in Vanity Fair, slammed the then-possibility of a Heartburn film as “child abuse,” going so far as to make the case that Bernstein’s betrayal was far less harmful than Ephron laying bare the details of her story. As Vox, Wieseltier equated the potential creation of a film adaptation to “the infidelity of a mother toward her children.” The film adaptation even played a pivotal role in the divorce agreement, which included stipulations that Bernstein be allowed to meet with Nichols and view an early cut, and that a share of the profits from the film be placed in a trust for their children. Following the finalization of their divorce, Bernstein disparaged Ephron and the Heartburn screenplay, claiming that it “continues the tasteless exploitation and public circus Nora has made out of our lives.”

KIM: responds… [as if he had no part in creating the circus! His affair sparked the book! He cheated on her! All she did was chronicle it! How does that make HER the bad guy?]

AMY: Any way, listeners, if you’re like me and  never gave Heartburn a read, go read it. Or re-read it, like Kim!

KIM: That’s all for today’s episode, blah blah blah…