Like all my writing, it verges on the oversharing. This is funny because the memoir, the one published this month, is about the most personal thing that has ever happened to me: John’s death, and what went on because of it. The novel will never be published for several reasons, but mostly (and this is only funny in context) because it is too personal. We had both written about him dying for money we had tried to make art out of something terrible, we had tried to, as it were, go full Ephron. He was incredibly funny about dying, and he wrote very funny things about dying very young. The person being mourned in almost all of them seemed almost unrecognizable to us, which was strange, because these were people who only knew him through his work. We went down the stack of condolence cards, picking out all the people John had liked (small pile), and all the people John had loved (even smaller pile), and all the people John had been rude about (big pile), and all the people none of us had ever heard of (biggest pile). “It happens to nicer people every day.”īy it we meant death, and also everything else that had happened to John. “It fucking could,” he said, after a minute. “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer person,” read my friend, and then he put his phone face down on the sofa and took a big drag on one of John’s cigarettes.

“You write like an open wound,” said my friend, and I said: thank you.

Then I wrote about what it was like to fall in love again. I wrote about what it was like to be not-widowed in your twenties. You have read the story behind the story. You have read the introductions, and the essays, and the memoirs. It’s sort of like: if you know enough to know that Ephron’s first husband had cats, not hamsters, you know Ephron well enough to call her Nora, and if she wasn’t dead, the two of you would be friends. There is kind of a cachet in doing it, for Ephron fans. You can notice that Ephron uses the same descriptions for herself as for Rachel Samstat, often word for word you can unpick her thin system of pseudonyms you can cross-reference characters. If you want to, and Kornbluth does, you can bring receipts for this. She is pregnant with their second, and he is having an affair with the long-necked, long-nosed wife of the British ambassador, Thelma Rice. If you are unfamiliar with the rough plot of Heartburn, it goes like this: Rachel Samstat, a famous writer, is married to Mark Feldman, a famous journalist. As in: if a woman turns her pain into money, is it art?Īs in: the art of the novel means it’s not a novel if it happened, and we all know that the things in Heartburn happened, so it’s not a novel.

Novel by nora ephron