Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life (Little, Brown and Company, 2022) by Delia Ephron

—Jan Farrington

At a difficult point in motherhood and life, I remember laughing myself sick (or well, perhaps) over Delia Ephron’s How to Eat Like a Child. In the decades since, Ephron wrote books for kids and novels for adults, wrote or co-wrote screenplays for You’ve Got Mail, Michael, and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants—and penned some stage plays too, including Love, Loss, and What I Wore, written with her late sister Nora Ephron.

Thus, picking up a copy of her latest book wasn’t a stretch at all. I was eager to know where she’d been, and what she thought about it—and I’ll admit it, I was still looking for laughs.

There are plenty of those in Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life, but as the subtitle should have told me, there’s more. This is the story of how Ephron grieved the loss of her husband (musical theater book writer Jerome Kass), her sister and writing partner Nora, and others. It’s also the story of how she weathered some dire, life-changing troubles of her own—and found new joy. By the time I hit the middle chapters I had to know, and checked online (not wanting to embarrass myself with a peek at the last page): Delia Ephron is, in fact, alive and well.

As for the rest, you’ll have to read it yourself. Ephron is funny, honest, and clear-eyed about everything from dating (again) at an older age, to the surprise and confusion of confronting both happiness and mortality at the same exact moment.

The four Ephron sisters—Nora, Delia, Amy, Hallie—all grew up to be writers of one sort or another. It was in the blood: their parents, Henry and Phoebe Ephron, wrote movie screenplays (for Daddy Long Legs, Carousel, Desk Set) and the 1961 Broadway play Take Her, She’s Mine (later a movie). Here’s Delia writing about dating, and her Mom:

My mother had given me heaps of ambition—something I am immensely grateful for—but no guidance on men. “Pick one hairdo and stick to it,” she told me when I was about eight. “You’re pretty enough for all normal purposes” was another one of her favorites. As for romance/men/love, that was the sum of it. It took some therapy, and many unloving boyfriends, for me to find my confidence. Somewhere buried in me was still that vulnerable single girl. That feeling of wanting to be wanted, that girl I was before I became the woman I am.

My sensibilities had been so rattled by Jerry’s death, I could feel that young girl hanging around inside me, waiting to take me down.

When Delia was an 18-year-old college student, sister Nora set her up for a blind date with a Columbia student. How that long-ago evening (he went with Delia and her parents to their Broadway show) comes into the story…as I said, you’ll need to read the book.

What’s next in life? As Delia Ephron tells us, both in joy and sorrow, you just never know.