Delia Ephron writes her way through cancer
New book’s a medical thriller, memoir, love story and hero’s journey of her and husband
The story behind Delia Ephron’s latest book, “Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life,” began sweetly, like the romantic comedies Ephron wrote with her sister, Nora Ephron, the beloved author, director and screenwriter of “You’ve Got Mail” and “Sleepless in Seattle.”
But the delay that drew out Delia Ephron’s happy ending — the sine qua non of the narrative trope that is the Marriage Plot — was so catastrophic that if she had pitched the story to a studio executive, they would have turned it down as being too much, too over the top. Even for one of the four daughters of Phoebe and Henry Ephron, the tart-tongued screenwriting couple behind “Carousel” and “Desk Set.”
The backdrop was terrible loss. In 2012, Nora Ephron died of leukemia, a death that shocked the world because she had kept her long illness a secret from everyone except a few friends and family members. Three years later, Delia Ephron’s husband of more than three decades, Jerome Kass, a theater, film and television writer, died of prostate cancer. Nearly a year after that, Ephron wrote an essay for The
New York Times about what happened when she disconnected his landline. It was a piquant sketch of contemporary life and widowhood involving hapless encounters with operators at telephone company call centers and the eye-crossing rage that wrestling with technology can elicit.
The essay touched a nerve with many people, including Peter Rutter, a widower from San Francisco, who wrote an email to Ephron. He was a Jungian psychiatrist; he, too, had tilted with a phone company after his spouse’s death and, he added, he and Delia had met before. They had gone on a few dates a half-century earlier. Nora Ephron had fixed them up, he said, although Delia Ephron had no memory of their (chaste) encounters. In this way, email by email, Rutter wooed Ephron, and after a few weeks of potent correspondence, they met in person, and their epistolary romance blossomed into the real thing.
Four months later, Ephron was diagnosed with leukemia. The couple married at NewYork-Presbyterian/ Weill Cornell Medical Center, the same hospital where Nora Ephron had died, because by then Delia Ephron had begun her treatment — a violent course of chemotherapy, and then more chemotherapy, and finally a stem cell transplant — all of which would nearly kill her. Jessie Nelson, a screenwriter and director, officiated, one of the few friends Ephron allowed to share her ordeal.
“You’ve Got Mail” had careened into “Love Story.” But unlike the doomed Ali MacGraw character in that 1970s weepy film, Ephron had no intention of drifting quietly away. She fought like crazy to stay alive, and “Left on Tenth,” recently released from Little, Brown and Company, is her account of that terrifying experience. It’s a medical thriller, a cancer memoir woven through with a love story, and it’s a hero’s journey to boot, to borrow a phrase from her husband the Jungian. Except there were two heroes: Ephron, who passed through the gates of death, and Rutter, her steadfast champion, who accompanied her.
“So many extraordinary things happened,” Ephron said, “and there’s no logic to explain them. Yet they happened to me, and I’m actually rather ordinary.”
To write the book, Ephron, now 77 and two years cancer-free, had to report on her lost year, she said, because she remembered so little of it. She pored over her emails and medical records, which the hospital delivered at her request and totaled 6,000 pages. She interviewed the female friends who had been her support group.
“I think for everybody who has had as traumatic an experience as I had,” Ephron said, “or even half as traumatic, if you can paint it, knit it, dance it, it will be better. For me, I could take this thing, and I could write it.”
“Left on Tenth” is rendered in fragments, a structure that mimics Ephron’s experience of her illness and treatment, which she recalled in flashes. One chapter is a scant paragraph describing the exchange with the doctor who each day appeared at Ephron’s hospital room door to ask if she had eaten anything. No, she would invariably reply. One day, she added, despairingly, “This is rough.” The doctor looked at her intently. “This is war,” he said.
In the years since Nora Ephron’s death, treatment for leukemia had evolved, and Delia Ephron’s first chemotherapy was an experimental drug called CPX-351. It worked, for a time. When her cancer returned after six months, her only hope was a stem cell transplant. As with the chemo, the treatment in that department had progressed. But because Ephron was in her 70s, her chances for surviving were very low.
The ghost of Nora Ephron hovered. “You are not your sister,” doctors would tell Delia Ephron, over and over. “You can have a different outcome.”
Patients have to be cancer-free before a stem cell transplant, so Ephron underwent another round of CPX-351. The treatment worked, and she was cleared for her transplant, which also worked. But Ephron’s body revolted. She could keep no food down and soon could not breathe on her own. “Failure to thrive” was the official diagnosis.
A stem cell transplant is a profound identity shift, Rutter said. “The miracle, and the trauma, in crossing over from death to life is of equal stature to a heart transplant. The simplest way to explain it is Delia was restored to herself, but she had to go through the gates of death to do it. It deepens anybody who has been close to that.”
Ephron shrugged. “You end up in the situation, and you just do what you do.”
Rutter said gently, “Actually Delia, that is the essence of being heroic. You persist even if it seems impossible.”