Not the world’s first novel to include recipes (the Brazilian author Jorge Amado, for one, did it in his 1966 novel, Dora Flor and Her Two Husbands), Nora Ephron’s Heartburn nonetheless predated the mainstreaming of the practice in bestsellers such as Like Water for Chocolate (1989) and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café (1987), both of which followed in Ephron’s book’s footsteps, too, in being adapted into hit movies. The conjunction of food and narrative isn’t particularly surprising, of course, as gourmands and litterateurs have had much in common for centuries. What’s more shocking about Ephron’s witty roman à clef is how bravely it tells the story of the author’s own divorce.

The novel concerns one Rachel Samstat, mother of a two-year-old and seven months pregnant, who discovers that her husband has been sleeping with another woman. The louse, Mark, is a syndicated columnist for whom Rachel—a New Yorker at heart—has relocated to Washington, D.C. (“Listen, even the Jews there are sort of Gentile”); according to gossip, the sordid details strongly resemble those precipitating Ephron’s divorce from the journalist Carl Bernstein, widely known for breaking the Watergate scandal and for having been played by Dustin Hoffman in the movie All the President’s Men (1976). Herself an author of “personal and chatty” cookbooks, Rachel peppers her tale of woe with jokes as well as cooking tips, and likewise dishes on the affairs and peccadilloes of her friends in D.C. and Manhattan. Therapists abound; Rachel, back in New York, attends her old therapy group, which is promptly—and typically, given that this is the gritty pre-Giuliani city—robbed at gunpoint by an armed bandit.

Aside from the voyeuristic pleasures of sorting out fact from fiction (which was also done by lawyers in the trials surrounding the 1986 movie adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson), the novel provides an unusually charming and insightful take on the social and culinary habits of ambitious, well-to-do Jews in what Tom Wolfe labeled the “Me Decade.” Though her shtick is to publish cookbooks of family recipes (with titles like My Grandmother’s Cookies and Uncle Seymour’s Beef Borscht), Rachel’s far from kosher—her responses to depression are shrimp fried rice and bacon hash. Still, she’s deeply connected to Jewish culture of one sort or another. The riff on Jewish Princes (Ephron’s riposte to the ridiculous stereotype of the Jewish American Princess) is a classic statement not only on gender relations and the fate of second-wave feminism, but also on the trajectory of Jewish comedy. Ephron’s one-liners, meanwhile, speak for themselves: “If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters.” “The major concrete achievement of the women’s movement in the 1970s was the Dutch treat.” “‘I think we’d better have a talk’ are the seven worst words in the English language.”