Heartburn - Nora Ephron

This book is essentially the epitome of chick-lit.  Dating back to the 80s, it's apparently semi-autobiographical; the main character, Rachel, is pregnant when she finds out that her second husband is having an affair, which evidently parallels some points of Ephron's own life.  I've never actually seen a Nora Ephron movie, at least not all the way through, and had no idea who she was before starting this, so this is my first real judgment of her.  And it wasn't pretty.

Heartburn reads not so much as a novel or a story as a long, rant-y journal entry that goes on and on and on about being Jewish, the lack of delicatessens in Washington, DC, hatred for Washington (the city, not the government) in general, and basically about how awesome Rachel is and how scummy her husband and his mistress are.  Rachel writes cookbooks, or books that involve recipes, for a living, and also appears on TV to demo said recipes.  Recipes are spattered throughout the book but the really good-sounding ones, like the bagels and lox and eggs, aren't given; instead she gives recipes for stuff like crispy potatoes.  But the main thing that dragged this book down for me was that I didn't like Rachel.  Yes, being pregnant and finding out that your spouse is cheating on you would suck.  But Rachel knew her husband was a cheater before she even married him; this wasn't the first time he'd had an, erm, indiscretion.  Cheaters gonna cheat, girl, and you should have known what you were getting into--especially because it was the second marriage this had happened to, though she wasn't pregnant in the first one.  And, though I allow that she's upset, she deals with her emotions like a passive-aggressive child rather than a functional adult.  For example, she notes that she and her husband keep their finances separate, all the time, and yet when he doesn't pay for her plane ticket, she gets pissed off at him.

Meryl Streep reads the audiobook edition of this and, while she is an excellent narrator, even she can't make Rachel truly likable.  I was glad that the book ended the way it did, because at least it showed some backbone, but honestly I just didn't like it overall.  Apparently it's also a movie that Meryl Streep stars in as Rachel, which is a good deal better than the book.  I should hope so; the book itself is vapid and eye-roll-worthy and isn't even really good as a trashy beach read, which is what it had been recommended to me as by the folks over at Buzzfeed.  Liars, Buzzfeed.  Liars.  Meryl Streep is too excellent to waste on a vapid movie, so I hope my fellow reviewers are right about the quality of the movie over the book.  It just feels like Ephron wanted to vent about this failing of her marriage--but that doesn't mean she had to put it out there for everyone to read.  Additionally, there's some incredibly racist stuff in here--she actually refers to a Latin American woman as a "refried taco," which is just--really?

2 stars out of 5, and that's mostly for the recipes that were included and how Ephron talks about food in general.