Ephron's 'Heartburn' (1983)

Take a personal tragedy (say, a horrid divorce). Fill it out with disproportionately outrageous scenarios (say, a mother running off to marry a man called Mel who thinks he's God). Mix through with incisive dialogue about love, food, marriage, and middle class angst. Sprinkle with homey recipes for Key Lime Pie and someone else's pot roast. Now you have Ephron's iconic hilariously bittersweet novel/thinly-veiled memoir Heartburn.

Only Ephron could write a novel about the heartbreak and betrayal of a second marriage that makes you immediately want to cook yourself a feast. She is a worldly, witty, sassy mentor, indulging us with a glimpse into her wonderful mind.

It starts with a 'disgusting inscription' that reveals to a seven-month pregnant narrator of her husband's affair with a 'fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm, and a nose as long as a thumb.' So begins a comic tale wrapped in all the trappings of middle aged bourgeois neuroses (each central character has a matching shrink. Oh, and there's group therapy). There is a high profile actress, the Kissingers, Washington dinner parties, nannies, and Bellinis. Interspersed with all of theses are really quite divine recipes. (There are two recipes for butter drenched recipes for crispy potatoes. I mean, need I say more?)

Between the recipes and underneath the chattiness, however, is a woman who is struggling with the loss of a husband, about to bring his child into the world. She grapples with a loss of a home, faces an uncertain future, and uses dry witticisms as a band-aid. It's an escapism into a privileged world still laced with the painful bits of life.

Once a customer asked for a recommendation, clearly high off this book. "I know there's going to be nothing else like it, but I don't want to leave her world." And that pretty much sums up this gem of a book. There's nothing else like it that will have you laughing in delight while providing a guide on how to live through something horrendous. Nothing else with sentences as perfect as "Two of us liked dark meat and two of us liked light meat and together we made a chicken." It's Nora Ephron's world, the rest of us are just living in it.

Read if you enjoy: the wittiness, dialogue, and perfect storytelling of When Harry met Sally.