If I have an issue with the memoir, it arises from the same quality that makes Delia Ephron come across as a singularly likable and bighearted person. For one thing, Nora Ephron kept her long illness a secret from virtually everyone but her closest friends, almost to the end, where Delia eventually invites her legions of friends into her world. She reminds herself that Nora’s death from leukemia does not ensure the same outcome for her. “You are not your sister” is a refrain of Delia’s story - as it may have been throughout her life. Peter remains, throughout, the most stalwart and devoted partner, so much so that every nurse writes “husband on duty” in her notes. Here’s where the memoir veers, somewhat problematically, into the realm of medical procedural - a paean to heroic doctors, medical miracles. When the remission fails, the only remaining option is a brutally painful stem cell transplant that has her begging to die. The AARP crowd.ĭelia’s oncologist treats her with a new experimental drug that puts her into remission. Ephron’s story is inspiring for all of us out there whose romantic lives or longings will never be the stuff of a big-box-office romantic comedy. In the early days of their romance, Delia and Peter take trips (she to his coast, he to hers), exchange the most romantic of texts and emails, buy a Ping-Pong table they can fit into their apartment only by moving out the dining room table. She doesn’t tell us much about the sex part, but we gather it’s very good - restoring “all the madness and thrill of falling in love at the stage in our lives when all that was supposed to be over.” Ephron presents a moving and heartfelt portrait of romance - also of passion.
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Theirs is not the story of comfy, late-life companionship. A few months after meeting, they spoke their vows in a New York City hospital room where Delia was receiving treatment. These appear to be two people who, having learned the art of making a marriage, possessed the gift for doing it again, well. Delia doesn’t forget her first husband along the way, any more than Peter forgets his first wife, and it is their love affair more than the grieving of their respective losses that propels the story. “Every day there are things I wish I could share with him.” And, “The silence in the apartment is loud.”īut “Left on Tenth” - though it opens with Jerry’s death - is less the story of a woman losing a husband than it is that of a woman falling in love again at age 72. “I took the sun setting personally,” she writes. She preserves his message on their answering service, her only record of his voice. I read with a stab of recognition Delia Ephron’s descriptions of the early days after her husband’s death. Joan Didion documented hers, as did Joyce Carol Oates and many others including myself. How could any writer, having lived this story, resist the urge to turn it into a memoir?Īs a person who has survived her own cancer experience - as partner, not patient - and one who shares the author’s dislike for the word “widow,” I’m well acquainted with the literature of husband-loss. Then she herself was diagnosed with the same blood cancer that killed her sister.
#Under observation my first love series#
A lifelong writer of screenplays, essays, novels (blessed and cursed to have followed on the heels of her sister Nora Ephron, with whom she collaborated on the quintessential ’90s romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail”), Delia found the source material for her new work from the worst possible series of losses. A writer lives her life in the world and in her head, both at once, and if an experience is deeply felt - particularly if it’s a painful one - she will almost invariably feel the need to make sense of it (whether in fiction or memoir) on the page.ĭelia Ephron is also a chronicler of her life, but one less inclined to focus on the dark side - even when the story is a tough one, as hers initially appears. To anyone who doesn’t write, this might seem unfathomable. But sometime around 3 in the morning, I went downstairs, made coffee and opened my laptop. For an hour I lay beside him, knowing this was the last time I’d ever get to do that.
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Over the 19 months that separated the day of Jim’s diagnosis from the moment I woke up next to him in our bed and knew his heart had stopped, I had barely set foot in the room that housed my desk. He looked me square in the eye as he spoke. Six years ago, a few weeks before he died from pancreatic cancer, my good and well-loved husband made an observation from his hospital bed. LEFT ON TENTH A Second Chance at Life By Delia Ephron