Word: ephron
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...Take Her, She's Mine opened on Broadway. The autobiographical comedy by Phoebe and Henry Ephron concerned a middle-aged couple and their recalcitrant daughter Mollie. Onstage the teen-ager was impersonated by an actress named Elizabeth Ashley. At home she was played by a girl called Nora...
...first novel, Nora Ephron, 41, has carried on the family tradition, going public with her personal tribulations. Anyone familiar with the author's bright, acerbic articles (Crazy Salad, Scribble Scribble) knows the tropes. As before, there is the Johnny Carson Comparative: She "was so stingy she once tried to sell a used nylon stocking to a mugger"; the Descriptive Thrust: "His coffee tastes like a very spicy old foot"; the Confessional Counterpunch: "I would imagine [my husband's] funeral . .. and how soon I could start dating...
These alone would make Heartburn a useful anthology of insults. But Ephron has another purpose. It is no secret that her marriages were more the stuff of Congreve than Cosmo. The first, to Comedy Writer Dan Greenburg (How to Be a Jewish Mother), ended in 1973. The second, to Journalist Carl Bernstein (All the President's Men), was finished shortly after the birth of their second son. Bernstein's association with an ambassador's wife had been Topic A at Washington parties. When Ephron discovered the liaison, she headed back to New York City and retribution...
Throughout, Ephron refuses to allow a note of self-pity; even her title is derisive. Humiliations are always relieved by pratfalls: Mark has been spending time on the psychiatrist's couch-unfortunately, Thelma is on it with him. Rachel's mother breathes her last, and when a nurse covers her with a sheet the old lady sits up, sings "Ta da!", checks out of the hospital and files for divorce...
...Rachel shuttles between Washington and Manhattan, she oscillates between hysteria and impartial reportage. But if she is contradictory as a character, she is consistent as an alter ego. Nora Ephron once imagined herself as a "wallflower at the orgy, . .. everyone else is having a marvelous time, eating, drinking, having sex in the back room, and I am standing on the side taking notes on it all." It was a premonitory passage. Here she is in 1983, everybody sleeping around like characters in a Restoration play, while she records the events with misery and wit. At times her comedy seems borrowed...