I can admit, with only a mild quaver in my voice, that although “Heartburn”—Nora Ephron’s novel, from 1983, a fictionalization of the end of her marriage to the philandering journalist Carl Bernstein—is good, often great, with moments of real dazzle and zing, it’s maybe not the very best work in the vast Ephron œuvre. The narrator, Rachel Samstat, is a food writer and cookbook author in her late thirties, seven months pregnant with her second child. She’s recently become aware that her husband (“a fairly short person”) is not only having an affair with a woman in their social set (“a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed”) but had the audacity to fall in love with her. Now everything in Rachel’s life is exploding in slow motion. The plot is low-stakes parlor drama—infidelity, family secrets, drunken marriage proposals, a little bit of genteel disorderly conduct. It’s a short book, fun and maudlin and vicious, with recipes interspersed in the text here and there in a way that actually sort of works, though after a while the endlessness of Rachel’s misery begins to wear a reader down. Naturally, the novel became a movie, in 1986, with a screenplay by Ephron and Mike Nichols in the director’s chair. Despite those sterling credits, not to mention Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in the starring roles, the film is unambiguously atrocious, a boring slog through yuppie malaise.
The movie version of “Heartburn” makes clear that the best part of the novel is Rachel’s narration—her gimlet evisceration of her various crises, her close read of her own narcissism, her exquisite sensitivity to the social signifiers of the early nineteen-eighties, her off-the-cuff Borscht Belt punch lines. (“My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.”) The reason “Heartburn” didn’t land as a movie was because it watched Rachel Samstat through a camera, instead of watching everyone else through Rachel Samstat. Anyone who reads Ephron knows that her nonchalant conversationalism is the real engine of her magic, so it’s a little surprising that it took thirty years for “Heartburn” to take on its third and optimum media form. The 2013 audiobook, read by Streep, is what “Heartburn” always ought to have been. The novel was never really a novel, and certainly was never supposed to be a movie: it’s a five-and-a-half-hour comedic monologue, a full-on standup set complete with nested stories and sidebar digressions. Somehow, even the recipes work better uttered out loud.
I first downloaded the “Heartburn” audiobook several years ago, out of a sense of Ephron completionism, and also perhaps out of an overly personal affinity for Rachel Samstat as a character. (“Sometimes,” she says, of being a person who writes about food for a living, “the possible irrelevance of what you are doing doesn’t cross your mind until it’s too late.”) For one reason or another, I never got around to actually listening to it until recently, as the long pandemic winter faded into a dull gray pandemic spring, and I needed something to listen to while driving to and from various grocery stores. I am something of an audiobook addict, largely because I can’t imagine anything more pleasing than the sensation of being read to by someone who is good at reading. The reader may do voices, she may pause dramatically here and lean in on a punch line there, but it’s the simple transaction that matters: someone reads, I listen. With Meryl Streep, it’s something different. I had just pulled into the parking lot of a hideously expensive farm store in the Hudson Valley when it occurred to me that she wasn’t reading “Heartburn”; she was performing it, of course. I wasn’t a listener; I was her private audience.
The scene that prompted this realization involves Streep performing Rachel performing Rachel’s mother, Bebe. It’s one of the novel’s first big set pieces, a crosstalk-and-slapstick routine. Rachel is visiting Bebe in the hospital, where Bebe has made a miraculous and sudden recovery from liver failure and is telling her daughter about a vivid hallucination that brought her back from the brink of death by filling her with rage at her husband: “I was the one who made us rich, and now the bastard is going off and spending my money on bimbos while I’m stuck in goyische heaven in an inappropriate costume. ‘Fuck this,’ I said to myself, and at that moment I came back.”
I’d always put the emphasis on the “fuck”—“Fuck this, I said to myself,” I would say to myself—but Streep plays it the other way. “Fuck this,” she reads, with an almost histrionic lift on the fricative, the hint of an incredulous question mark. Instead of a statement of being over it, the phrase becomes the climax of Bebe’s life-giving wrath, an anger so real and so exquisitely petty that I scrubbed the audio back a minute to listen to it again. When I got home, I played it for my husband, and then we started the audiobook over from the beginning, listening to it together the way we would binge-watch a TV show, marvelling over its perfection and, once it was over, debating whether we should start it again right away or give ourselves some time to miss it. It is not terribly earth-shattering to say that Meryl Streep is a magnificent actor, but it’s more than that: her voice makes Rachel Samstat’s voice a sharper version of itself. “I highly recommend having Meryl Streep play you,” Ephron said in 2004, in a televised tribute to Streep, who was being honored with the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award. “She plays all of us better than we play ourselves, although it’s a little depressing knowing that, if you want to audition to play yourself, you would lose out to her.”
