Absorbing her musings, especially about writing, reassured me her prose was as beautifully structured as ever, but she wasn’t forcing herself to find answers.
Some passages come off like first drafts, but that moved me: Smith seemed as reluctant as I was to contend directly with the virus’s toll, as torn as I felt about attempting to turn my dread into sourdough. But Smith’s Intimations, a collection of essays written during and about the isolation and anxiety of 2020, serves less as a bleak reminder of our social-distancing era and more as comforting evidence that even one of the most clear-eyed authors struggled to shape her thoughts.
Reading about the pandemic may sound like a terrible idea for someone trying to move past the misery of the pandemic. Sometimes, when you want a book to take you away, you have to choose one that doesn’t hit home. But Korelitz leans into the drama and the fun. (Things kick off when a writer steals a dynamite story line from a dead person.) That’s not to say the book is only action it plays with meaty questions about artistic ownership, gender, and creative identity. It is, in fact, a plot-driven book about the power of a good plot. The title of Korelitz’s twisty thriller feels like a wink to the reader. When I read The Plot, I realized I’d been picking the wrong material. Getting to the last page always seemed like hiking up a mountain it would be worthwhile, even beautiful, but also exhausting. I kept searching for something that would echo what I was feeling: serious reflections on sickness, grief and loss, the world ending. Recently, during a particularly grim stretch of months, I was desperate to get lost in a book. In one paragraph, her thoughts turn from despair to suicidal ideation to the habits of “neurasthenic,” poetic sad girls to this take on that famous genre: “Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn and I’ll show you a real asshole.” Did I mention that recipes are folded into the text? An actually perfect novel. Ephron’s tone throughout is part stand-up comic, part beloved friend sending a bitchy, meandering email. The book is a lightly (very lightly) fictionalized version of Ephron’s own devastating marital crisis, when she discovered that her husband, the former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, was having an affair with a mutual friend while Ephron was pregnant with their second child. I finished it in a few days, sucking up the chapters like air or a cocktail. After I had my twins in the summer of 2020, when my brain was as sludgy as risotto and I couldn’t imagine finishing a CNN chyron, let alone a novel, my very brilliant friend Annalisa recommended Heartburn as a “gateway” back into reading.
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