How to “Get Over It” Using Anger Creativelyīecause of Ephron’s inimitable use of humor, I’m not sure she meant “Get Over It” as coldly as it sounds. But maybe she doesn’t trust that most people would empathize and not judge her. Does she think we’d see her as just as “idiotic” as she sees herself? There wasn’t anything shameful about what happened to her. Yes, she’d rather we laugh at her than pity her. But what is this pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps “Get Over It” philosophy meant to accomplish? She’s avoiding pity. I turned it into a rollicking story … wrote a novel …bought a house with the money from the novel.Įphron had some pretty painful feelings. … angry and hurt and shocked … I survived. And I felt gas-lighted and idiotic, completely mortified.

I was terrified about what was going to happen to my children and me. It’s a very funny book, but it wasn’t funny at the time. In her 2010 essay The D Word ( HuffPost, March 8, 2010), Ephron admits to all the feelings Heartburn’s heroine avoids: But, although Heartburn is a roman a clef of sorts, it’s not Nora Ephron’s whole story.

As readers, we’re neither allowed to feel or learn a thing or two about the emotional travails of divorce. The Emotional Travails of Divorce in Heartburn But the speed with which Ephron throws her heroine the life preserver of a wicked retort may suggest that what has been sacrificed is not merely plausibility, but emotional truth. We understand that she has been wounded by her husband’s infidelity.

What is lost when a fictional character’s pain is instantly dissipated by a joke? If we can’t feel sorry for Rachel, we run the risk of not feeling anything at all. Her therapist tells us bluntly: “She makes jokes even when she feels terrible.įrancine Prose’s review of The Most of Nora Ephron (2013) in the Novemissue of The New York Review of Books raises insightful questions about the use of humor in Heartburn: Yet when you laugh you might be avoiding tears. Especially when not suspecting anything remotely of the kind, she willingly gives the recipe to her. For Rachel Samstat, Heartburn’s betrayed wife, it’s certainly not funny that her husband’s having an affair with a woman who just came to dinner and asked for her carrot cake recipe. Why does she turn a sad, disturbing, and enraging reality into funny?ĭivorce isn’t a laughing matter. Her novel, Heartburn (a barely fictionalized account of the end of her marriage), even manages to make us laugh at divorce. She could make us laugh at our necks, and at almost anything. “’Tis the season to be jolly.” It’s also the season to miss people.

Heartburn novel