Love, Loss, and What I Gained: Delia Ephron’s New Memoir Feels, Yes, Like a Rom-Com

“It’s funny,” Delia Ephron is saying, when I talk to her by phone at the end of April. “Life just hands you stuff. You can’t control what it hands you. Yes, there’s magic. But then there’s this unfathomably awful thing. There are extremes in  battle. When I fell in love it was kind of instant and wonderful—and over email; it was funny, to fall in love over e-mail after writing You’ve Got Mail.  But then—this other thing! It was phenomenal to feel so much love and then to get that diagnosis.”

Delia Ephron is talking, of course, about her instant-New York Times-bestselling memoir Left On Tenth: A Second Chance at Life. This, her fourteenth book, is a beautiful if occasionally harrowing hymn to love, perseverance, humor, friendship—and, yes, glamour—in the course of heroically and persistently battling a dread disease. Delia is the second of the four famous writing Ephron sisters (the beloved Nora died in 2012. After Delia is Hallie and then Amy) who were raised in Beverly Hills, explicitly to be writers. Their parents were the tart-tongued Henry and Phoebe Ephron, who wrote the likes of Desk Set for Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and There’s No Business Like Show Business for Marilyn Monroe.