Life threw Ephron a plot twist
Rom-com writer pens lovely and moving memoir
Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life
Delia Ephron Little, Brown
Delia Ephron’s husband of 35 years, Jerry, died of cancer in 2015. Ephron was left a widow on 10th Street. Jerry’s death is where the story begins, with an extended, chaotic scene featuring a late-night fall, a do-not-resuscitate order and an argument with a crew of EMTS, followed by a few hours of uneasy calm. Jerry slips away before dawn, quietly losing consciousness while no one is watching.
Ephron lost Jerry just three years after the death of her older sister and creative collaborator, filmmaker and writer Nora Ephron. A year after Jerry’s death, Delia developed acute myeloid leukemia (AML), the same disease that killed her sister.
In a plot twist worthy of a movie, Delia’s illness overlaps with a new love. She had just started dating a psychiatrist named Peter, who reached out to her by email after reading a touching and hilarious op-ed about her attempts to cancel Jerry’s Verizon service. In another coincidence, it turns out Peter and Delia already knew each other, although she’d forgotten. They had gone on a few dates in college, set up by none other than Nora. After a whirlwind romance and several long talks about “what it meant to start something intense and meaningful at this age ... when death is right there in front of us,” they decide to marry in the hospital as she begins treatment for AML.
But things get dark.
At her lowest point, depressed and exhausted after a stem cell transplant, Delia feels “deep in my bones a despair, an isolation from everyone, a wish to be dead.” She doesn’t believe in life after death; staying alive here in the physical realm, then, is the only way she can still be. No wonder she fights so hard to come back from the brink and to hang onto her earthly home.
Breaking sentences and phrases into speaking rhythms, Delia encourages us not to see her prose on the page so much as to hear a story told in her voice. Delia made it to the other side of her illness. But she also never loses sight of the fact that while a book’s ending might be considered happy or sad depending on where the plot stops, all of us human beings are headed for the same ending sooner or later.
When a doctor explains the low success rate of an aggressive treatment, Delia responds in objection, “Peter and I just fell in love.” What is true in that moment remains excruciatingly true always: that even the colossal power of love does not ultimately earn anyone a reprieve.
But although death saturates this book, it is far from a downer. To the emphatic contrary, it is a joy.
That’s the singular, lovely magic of this particular memoir by this particular writer about this particular slice of her life. She reminds us darkness makes the light look even brighter.