Books: Wallflower at the Orgy

HEARTBURN by Nora Ephron; Knopf; 179 pages; $11.95

In 1961 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.

In her 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.

It takes the form of a memoir composed by Rachel Samstat, cookbook writer and veteran of two marriages. The first, to a neurasthenic "so neat he put hospital corners on the newspaper he lined the hamster cage with," is a mutual misunderstanding. The second, to Columnist Mark Feldman, is even more calamitous. As Rachel acknowledges, "The man is capable of having sex with a Venetian blind." Even so, she is astonished when, swollen with her second pregnancy, she learns that Mark has been sleeping with Washington Hostess Thelma Rice. "The most unfair thing about this whole business," she begins, "is that I can't even date." Later the saline level rises. When Mark contritely bursts into tears, Rachel concludes, "It's true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own."

She dreads resumption of the single life: "The old New York ratio going against me... packs of Amazons roaming the streets ... for someone genuinely eligible and self-supporting who didn't mind a little cellulite." She wonders how she failed: perhaps her breasts were too small, or "Maybe we just ran out of things to renovate." The motivations hardly matter. When little Nathaniel is born prematurely, his mother bitterly acknowledges the truth: "Something was dying inside me, and he had to get out."

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.