She was a columnist and foremost the author of satirical books known for their unusual titles, aimed at a female readership, as well as a playwright and television writer.
She joined The SoHo Weekly News as an advertising assistant, then began publishing articles with a piece on an anarchist conference in New York City.
[2] She left the New York Daily News and was then hired by The Village Voice[3] to write alternating columns, "Dear Problem Lady" and "Tongue in Chic."
She continued to produce books based on her columns into the mid 1990s, while becoming a writer for television with Kate and Allie, then moving to Hollywood, where she worked on Dear John.
The New York Times said of her that "Like Dorothy Parker, Ms. Heimel is an urban romantic with a scathing X-ray vision that penetrates her most deeply cherished fantasies.
: "in addition to the saucy insights on the so-called war between the sexes, the wry disbelief of the potential for living anywhere except Manhattan, and the cynical acceptance of the inevitability of aging that marked her previous compilations (Get Your Tongue Out Of My Mouth, I'm Kissing You Good-Bye!, 1993, etc.
"[7][8][9][10] Heimel stated in Advanced Sex Tips for Girls, her final book, that she was not accepted by the feminist movement; that being too sexy to be an academic feminist and too angry for "women's" magazines, she sometimes had difficulty finding outlets that would publish her work; and that for this reason, she accepted an offer to work for Playboy and was the writer of its "Women" column for decades from 1983.
[1][2][7] After they separated, she lived with Brodie in communes and worked as a secretary and with "lefty social organizations" in London for three years and then moved to New York City.