Helen Fowler Writer

I’m almost ashamed to confess it, but I’d never read Heartburn by Nora Ephron until this month. Despite loving her movies over the last forty or so years. But after our local book group chose the title for this month’s discussion, I sat down and raced through the chatty yet heartbreaking pages. Now I wish I’d read it sooner.

It’s hard not to be in awe of Ephron’s accuracy in nailing the wider social trends shaping women’s lives (divorce, remarriage, the chance for women to marry and have careers) in the latter part of the 20th century. Part of her genius lies in marrying her understanding of these bigger social changes with a microscopic analysis of how these operates in individual lives. With biting satire.

Skewering and ridiculing

She’s brilliant when it comes to the absurd minutiae of social arrangements, ridiculing and skewering pretensions at the same time as pretending to go along with them. Ephron focuses wittily on areas such as fashionable paint colours for a media power couple’s new home – écru, cerise, burnt sienna. And she provides recipes for vinaigrette for green leaf salad, even mentioning crème brûlée and bouillabaisse too. It’s poignant that none of the fancy grub makes any difference to the pain. Of course it still hurts to know her husband is cheating on her, poor woman.

The recipes themselves carry quite a punch, though. As her relationship worsens, Rachel turns to comfort eating, outlining for us how to make indulgent mashed potatoes. Her acerbic wit pushes her to inject anger and self-protective humour into even something as seemingly banal as making mash, when she concludes the recipe dolefully and pointedly: “Serves one.” Her husband meets a fitting come-uppance when she slams some of the gourmet food into his face, before stalking out on him. Well done, Nora, I thought then.

Validation

Heartburn today feels like part of the same writing tradition that would later lead to the adventures of Sex and the City, where we celebrated a class of financially independent women who’d emerged after the birth control-inspired revolution of the sixties and seventies.

When the movie When Harry Met Sally (for which Ephron wrote the screenplay) came out in 1989, she made it okay for millions of young women (people like me, I was 22 at the time) to be ourselves; single, sexually active, focused on our careers, sometimes working as journalists or in similar careers, moving to the big city after university, navigating a world that seemed full of baffling complexity. Hoping for love. Struggling to find it. Unable to see how family and love and work could ever fit together, all while operating in a world designed to benefit men. And only men.

When Sleepless in Seattle (directed by Ephron, who also co-wrote the script) came out in 1993, it defined my romantic life in nineties London. Ephron made me feel it was okay to be female, working, and unmarried at a time when plenty of other, older women disapproved of me for a ‘career-oriented’ lifestyle, and plenty of men just saw me as fair game, fresh meat for them to paw and pursue.

True life calling?

The nineties were a time when I often felt expected to give work up for what ought to have been my true life calling: marriage and motherhood. But I was having too much fun, also felt I’d invested so much in my career, plus I felt too hurt by the guy I’d wrongly hoped would be ‘the one’ for me. Ephron made me feel it was okay to be like that, to have professional ambitions. To get it wrong, And to still want to find love.

When someone in the newsroom told me it would become impossible to find a husband once I passed 25, part of me was gullible enough to believe them. In contrast, Nora Ephron made me feel like I wasn’t a spinsterish freak, as I feared, destined to die alone because I chose not to marry the cheating user boyfriend from my university days, the one who mangled my heart so badly I felt like giving up on love altogether. No, Ephron seemed to be saying, instead, I was one of a growing band of attractive, successful women with good jobs. I didn’t need to marry a the wrong man just because he was the first guy who asked me to marry him, not according to Ephron.

Ephron legitimised and defined the role of a city-based career girl looking for love long before Bridget Jones was even a thought at the back of Helen Fielding’s mind.

Breaking old taboos

What I also love about Heartburn is how Ephron refuses to be defined by her husband’s betrayal, breaking old taboos by even talking about the fear, heartache and sordid embarrassment of it all. Unlike Ephron, most women at the time pretended they hadn’t noticed their husbands cheating or being abusive. Ephron had the guts to get honest and get out of her unhappy set-up. Not many women did that in those days.

She was one of the first female writers to write openly about the pain and indignity of life with a faithless husband, a small baby and a feckless, unavailable building contractor who wasn’t answering her calls. I feel for her, probably we all do.

She lifted the lid on the ‘perfect’ lifestyle, having the guts to admit you can master the gourmet cooking, stylish writing, the perfect vinaigrette; you can even be having amazing if shallow sex with a successful writer whose prose style you admire and who’s reasonably competent in the sack. And yet, unfortunately, you can still be miserably unhappy.

Unhappy enough to pick yourself and your baby up and get the hell out of there, because a brilliant written style doesn’t really add up to much more than a winning way with semi-colons, as all too many of us grow up to realise. Ephron understood that, not many people did.

Not alone or weird

And I cherish her courage and her honesty, because they meant she was able to articulate experiences millions of other women (including me) were also having, but at the time felt alone and guilty for experiencing, worried we were being punished for wanting decent jobs by getting stuck with shitty, faithless boyfriends. Until Ephron showed us we weren’t alone or weird, we were actually pretty normal. A relief.

It’s only now I’m a mother myself I understand how far ahead of her time Ephron was in writing about pregnancy with such honesty. She really understood how vulnerable and terrified you feel when held together with stitches and leaking milk, tortured by suspecting you can’t count on anyone except yourself as you try to negotiate unfamiliar territory.

For the first time, I’m properly appreciating how far Ephron shaped my psyche when I was a young adult. Like Ephron, I was a journalist as well, like her I too had a love life involving behaviour we’d nowadays probably not hesitate to call abusive. Like her, I worried. Obsessively.

Distant and drink-sodden

Love felt very elusive in those distant, drink-sodden days. In Ephron’s work, though, I knew I’d found a friend. And not just any old ally, but a friend who’d walked many of the same superficially dazzling but lonely and treacherous routes I’d taken myself. She not only understood my world, understood how painful it could be under all the prestige and glitz, she also made me feel I was okay in wanting more than marriage and children. And, sometimes, in those dark, lonely times, all you need to feel better is to know you’re not alone. Norah Ephron did that for me and for millions of other women too. I’ll always be grateful to her.