The title Heartburn represents more than simply Rachel Samstat’s constant digestive distress during a pregnancy that seems unrelenting and endless. The word also symbolizes the emotional pain that Rachel feels upon learning of her husband’s cold-blooded betrayal and his attitude of righteous indignation that she should have the nerve to resent his love affair with Thelma Rice. Nora Ephron’s novel is not simply a comic story about pregnancy, nor is it merely a cookbook: It is a novel concerning male-female relationships, truth, betrayal, guilt, self-pity, and one woman’s romance with food.

The work is an ironic look at modern married life in the 1970’s. Rachel Samstat and Mark Feldman are typical of upper-middle-class professionals who have no more control over their emotions than the average man or woman. Ephron is careful to reveal Rachel’s pain in tiny bits, like the pepper and spices added to a good sauce, while simmering the whole question of love and betrayal, men and women, over a low but steady flame of outrageous comedy.

The narrator begins with a joke, her initial reaction to her husband’s infidelity: that “the most unfair thing” about it is that she “can’t even date.” She then discusses Mark’s character and her own, their relationship, and her cooking, trying to uncover the key to his betrayal and the reason that she keeps falling for men who cheat on her and lie about it, and badly. First she thinks that he is crazy, and then she blames his mother, her mother, and the “other woman,” Thelma. Finally Rachel leaves Washington, D.C., to go to New York City, staying in her father’s apartment and rejoining her therapy group led by Vera Maxwell.

There are flashbacks revealing details of her romance and marriage to Mark, the significance of food in their lives, and her self-doubt, which reveals a pattern of choosing men who will betray her. Yet even in the depths of anger and pain, Rachel finds the humorous side to everything—she even suspects that Mark wants her to come back to him only so that he can find out the secret to her vinaigrette recipe. She is not far wrong, since Mark no longer loves her, treats her terribly, and only wants her to stay with him until the baby is born, for the sake of his own reputation.

Rachel’s response to a crisis is either to laugh it off as one more humorous spectacle in a cruel world or to remember a particularly good recipe for sorrel soup or Key lime pie that allows her to forget the pain. Even when her therapy group is robbed at gunpoint and she must surrender the diamond ring that Mark gave her on the birth of their first child, Rachel wonders if the police officer who interviews her might be available for a date. Yet her attempts to understand men and her relationships with them are typical of the reactions of most women. People always wonder why she picked Mark, and Charlie before him, when in fact she (and other women) have made no conscious choice.

Throughout this episodic farce, the irony of Rachel’s life reverberates in her self-mockery, her choice to be a “good girl” and return to Mark as expected, and even her willingness to give Mark the salad dressing recipe despite her gut instinct to keep it from him as punishment for his cruelty. Rachel survives and in that sense triumphs, with her good humor and sense of self intact.

Like Ephron’s other books, which comment upon and...