A pity Nora Ephron is so famous. A pity the grubby details of her divorce from muckraker Carl Bernstein have been trumpeted in the magazines and savored by millions in the Safeway checkout line. Full disclosure may be the great desideratum of journalism, but it threatens to distort appreciation of Ephron's surprisingly touching first novel ["Heartburn"].

For the first questions in many minds will be, where does she get her nerve? How could she publish a roman so shamelessly a clef, exposing the warts, peccadilloes and worse of her family, ex-husbands and friends?…

Fans of Ephron's articles have come to expect no less. For years she has written brazenly in the first person, letting fly some of the niftiest ad hominem barbs since Dorothy Parker. What is curious—and effective—is that in the present book her lance seems a bit blunted. Wit gives way to rueful wisdom...