Mark Feldman is a fellow the nation’s capital cannot do without, a master interpreter of “bizarre remarks encompassing Washington and sex” and of the hidden political currents that flow through the District of Columbia. He has a syndicated column, appears regularly on the Sunday morning talk shows, knows his way around an oyster fork and a champagne glass. He is an idol, though an idol with feet of clay—or, Nora Ephron tells us, feet of roman à clef.

From the opening sentences of Ephron’s 1983 novel Heartburn, we know that Mark is having an affair, one that involves social climbing up the preternaturally tall wife of a hapless diplomat. That sort of thing goes on in D.C. all the time, but Mark’s timing is particularly graceless, since his wife, Rachel Samstat, is seven months pregnant and, as she laments three sentences in, “can’t even date.” Rachel, a cookbook author of some renown and, like Ephron, a foodie avant la lettre, splits for New York to consider her options. Mark is slow in coming around, but soon he’s professing his loyalty to Rachel once more—which, Rachel rightly suspects, is a pathetic maneuver to win her back for appearance’s sake.

Soon Mark is back with the woman “with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb,” immediately recognizable in the real-life Washington of the day. Rachel counts modest coup on her by circulating a rumor that Thelma Rice has an improbably contracted STD. Rachel then smacks Mark with a pie in the kisser, a slapstick fallback updated for the Reagan era.

Heartburn is famously about the dissolution of Ephron’s marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein, who was still riding the crest of fame for his Washington Post coverage of Watergate. They wed in 1976 and grew apart quickly, but it took until 1985 for the divorce to be finalized, with long arguments between attorneys about how Ephron, who’d already published her nicely vengeful novel and was working on a screenplay, would handle Bernstein’s depiction on film. (He’s played by Jack Nicholson; Rachel, by Meryl Streep.) But the subject of her book, Ephron later remarked, was wider than her marriage. Instead, it was about “power couples” in a grasping, media-hungry, yuppies-gone-wild era. In any event, she wrote shortly before her death in 2012, “Philip Roth and John Updike picked away at the carcasses of their early marriages in book after book, but to the best of my knowledge they were never hit with the ‘thinly disguised’ thing.”

Heartburn, book and movie, had both fans and critics, with some reviewers, including our own, worrying that its satire was mean-spirited, disjointed, or overwrought. Still, 40 years on, the novel holds up‚ not just for its sometimes-acerbic, often funny take on modern marriage, but also, as Stanley Tucci notes in a too-brief foreword to a new Vintage Books reissue, because of its thoughtful, episode-bridging, and well-tested recipes—part of the narrative precisely because Ephron “knew that good food is deserving of our time, thought, and attention.” And in the case of key lime pie, of good aim at a worthy target.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.