2. Memories

Nora Ephron's tabasco-spiked and bittersweet novel about a marriage on the rocks.

Seven months into her pregnancy, irrepressible food writer Rachel Samstat discovers that her husband Mark - a man who ‘would be capable of having sex with a Venetian blind’ - is in love with another woman.

In between trying to work out what went wrong, trying to win him back and loudly wishing him dead, Rachel offers us her favourite recipes.

Rachel recalls meeting her husband-to-be at a Washington party.

Nora Ephron was the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle.

The breakdown of Ephron’s own marriage to Carl Bernstein proved the perfect fuel for her only novel. Packed with snappy, hilarious, endlessly quotable one-liners – the stock-in trade of her award-winning screenplays - Heartburn is a rollercoaster of love, betrayal, loss and - most satisfyingly - revenge.

The novel was later made into a successful film starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. Nora Ephron died aged 71 in 2012.

Abridged by Antonia Hodgson.

Read by Julianna Jennings.

Producer: Justine Willett

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in August 2019.