Novelists have been drawing from their own lives since time immemorial…. But nobody has been quite as inspired by her own drama as Nora Ephron in her first novel, Heartburn …, which is as witty and malicious and personal as her journalism. In her widely read collected essays, Crazy Salad and Scribble, Scribble, Ephron revealed everything from her obsession with having small breasts to the secrets of her consciousness-raising "sisters." What makes her novel equally titillating (to people who care and even to some who don't) is that the story seems to be a thinly veiled version of the last weeks of Ephron's publicized marriage to reporter Carl Bernstein….

Does drawing so brutally from one's own life make a novel less artful? Less worthy of being taken seriously? This may make it more documentary, less transcendent, but it still can be an entertaining read. Ephron presumably has improved on...