In Heartburn, she thinly fictionalized herself as a food writer, scattering recipes throughout the book. And you’d be a fool to think she’d ever give that to her husband. At seven months pregnant, she finds out her husband has taken a lover, leaving her with nothing but a baby on the way and her recipe for the perfect vinaigrette. In Heartburn, she recounts the end to her second marriage. At least, that’s what she wrote in her 1983 autobiographical novel Heartburn, a book that is as much a lesson on hauling yourself out of heartache as it is on mastering the perfect vinaigrette. As for Ephron, she’d turn to potatoes-her carb of choice-when life got sharp around the edges, and wallowed in a bowl of buttery mashed comfort. On a bad day, there’s nothing a bowl of pasta-my carb of choice-and a Nora Ephron movie can’t salvage, or at least until the credits roll.

Her quips and one-liners have always been a source of comfort. Nora Ephron always knew best, especially when it came to food. I only want to go to the market and I only want to go to the restaurants. “Food, I think, is my favorite thing,” Nora Ephron once said to Vogue’s food critic Jeffrey Steingarten, during an interview in her Upper East Side kitchen, “When I go somewhere, I have no desire whatsoever to see a famous Renaissance painting.

Heartburn novel by nora ephron