Book #3: Heartburn by Nora Ephron

Funny enough, I've only heard about this book when Amy Poehler mentioned it in her memoir Yes, Please. But the fact that Nora Ephron wrote it made it stick in my mind, because her movies are some of my favorites. So I wrote it down and put it on my Goodreads account, and eventually checked it out from the library and it sat around at my house for a month and a half before I read it today. And I kind of wish I hadn't read it--just because of the subject matter. I hate stories about cheating spouses--and that's basically all this book is. Rachel Samstat, a cookbook writer, with one toddler son and seven months pregnant, finds out that her husband has been having a serious affair for months and that he has no intentions of breaking it off. The whole book is basically her funny, sarcastic reactions and thoughts on the whole situation and the whole month or two after finding out about the affair and what she decides to do about it. To make matters worse, it's an autobiographical novel based on Nora Ephron's marriage to Carl Bernstein (Watergate), and how she caught him cheating on her. So it's not just a story about a spouse cheating on her--it happened like this to her in real life. And no matter how funny and well-written this book is (which it is, don't get me wrong), the subject matter is still so distasteful and depressing to me that I don't like thinking about it. Plus, Rachel's life sounds eerily similar to mine right at this second (2-year-old son, seven months pregnant with another boy) which makes it all the less appealing to read. I feel like everyone in the novel was just so selfish (especially her husband, but also Rachel herself in a lot of ways--her two kids didn't ever factor into her thoughts about the break-up at all) and that wasn't all that fun to read. This was really a funny, quick read, but not worth all the negativeness of the storyline to me.