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Left on Tenth

A Second Chance at Life: A Memoir

ebook
0 of 2 copies available
Wait time: About 10 weeks
0 of 2 copies available
Wait time: About 10 weeks

The bestselling, beloved writer of romantic comedies like You've Got Mail tells her own late-in-life love story in her "resplendent memoir," complete with a tragic second act and joyous resolution (Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of The Good Left Undone).

Delia Ephron had struggled through several years of heartbreak. She’d lost her sister, Nora, and then her husband, Jerry, both to cancer. Several months after Jerry’s death, she decided to make one small change in her life—she shut down his landline, which crashed her internet. She ended up in Verizon hell.
 
She channeled her grief the best way she knew: by writing a New York Times op-ed. The piece caught the attention of Peter, a Bay Area psychiatrist, who emailed her to commiserate. Recently widowed himself, he reminded her that they had shared a few dates fifty-four years before, set up by Nora. Delia did not remember him, but after several weeks of exchanging emails and sixties folk songs, he flew east to see her. They were crazy, utterly, in love.
 
But this was not a rom-com: four months later she was diagnosed with AML, a fierce leukemia.
 
In Left on Tenth, Delia Ephron enchants as she seesaws us between tears and laughter, navigating the suicidal lows of enduring cutting-edge treatment and the giddy highs of a second chance at love. With Peter and her close girlfriends by her side, with startling clarity, warmth, and honesty about facing death, Ephron invites us to join her team of warriors and become believers ourselves.
A "Most Anticipated Book of 2022" by TIMEBustleParadePublishers WeeklyBoston.com
A "Best Memoir of 2022" by Marie Claire
A "Best Memoir of April" by Vanity Fair

 
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from January 3, 2022
      Playwright and novelist Ephron (Siracusa) balances profound sorrow with unconditional love in this radiant account of the “many left turns, some perilous, some wondrous” that her life took following her husband’s death. After a year of grieving the loss of her husband, Jerry—who died of cancer in their West Village apartment in 2015—Ephron reconnected with a long-lost acquaintance, a Jungian analyst named Peter, and was swept up in a whirlwind romance. But their honeymoon phase was unceremoniously ended when she was diagnosed with leukemia, the same cancer that her sister, filmmaker Nora Ephron, died of in 2012 (“‘You are not your sister’,” became a common refrain from the doctor, Ephron writes, “willing me to believe that I can have a different outcome”). Like a scene out of one of Nora’s movies, Ephron (“officially a cancer patient”) and Peter had an intimate hospital wedding. While moments of tenderness like these lend hope to her narrative, Ephron holds nothing back when recounting her harrowing episodes (even sharing a doctor’s note that recorded her “saying she wanted to die”), a rocky road that, after a brief remission, included traumatic stays in the ICU, toxic metabolic syndrome, and an excruciating bone marrow transplant that saved her life. Readers will be swept away by this triumphant story.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from February 1, 2022

      In her new memoir, Ephron will make readers feel, and with her short sentences and matter-of-fact voice, she'll make readers laugh, swoon, cringe, and cry, sometimes all within the same section of writing. The novelist, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter (she wrote the film You've Got Mail with sister Nora) begins this memoir with the story of her husband's death, from his time in hospice, to her grieving afterwards; she also introduces all the people who helped her through mourning. While trying to disconnect her late husband's phone line, she has a bad experience that she writes about in the New York Times. The essay sparks interest in a man from her past who reaches out to her via email; Ephron includes this correspondence, among many others, in the book. The events kick off a new love story that is the focus of the first part of the memoir; Ephron's leukemia is the theme of the second half. Through her own recollections and through emails, readers get to see the hope and positivity of Ephron's friends, as well as the despair she felt during her illness. VERDICT With poetic writing, strong characterization, and a powerful love story, Ephron's memoir takes readers on a journey of loss, pain, hope, and perseverance.--Natalie Browning

      Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from January 15, 2022
      A beloved writer in her 70s faces life's heaviest weather. Ephron, whose career includes humor, plays, screenplays, and novels, chronicles a series of "left turns, some perilous, some wondrous," that began with the death of her sister Nora in 2012, followed a few years later by the death of her husband of nearly four decades--the man "I'd been looking for...my whole life and he felt the same." Not long after Jerry's death, she heard from Peter. Though they had dated briefly in college, she had no memory of him. "My sensibilities had been so rattled by Jerry's death," she writes, "I could feel that young girl banging around inside me, waiting to take me down." Also a recent widower, Peter turned out to be another perfect match. In fact, their relationship, as depicted in the book, goes so well that you keep waiting for it to crash, right up until they are married in a room at the hospital where Ephron began treatment for the very disease that killed her sister. That particular left turn was especially difficult, and the author decided to have her assistant gather all her emails from 2015 to 2018 so she could tell the entire story. Many readers' only complaint will be that Ephron includes in full more of those emails than is strictly necessary. Along the way, we get wisdom about writing ("Writers are writers first. Before anything else. It's a calling") and charming insight into the relationship the author had with her superfamous older sister. "I didn't think the doctors were concerned about me, because they were Nora's doctors," she writes. "Also, she was a national treasure--a writer and director, reinventor of the romantic comedy, admired by women everywhere. I was just, well, me." Even more endearing than you'd think. Older readers will feel cheered by the story--and the fact that she remembers it all.

      COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from February 1, 2022
      Ephron should be called the Queen of Second Chances, and long may she reign. First there was the one-two punch of losing her cherished husband after a prolonged struggle with prostate cancer, and then there was the loss of her beloved-by-billions sister Nora to leukemia. No spring chicken when these events occurred, Ephron learned to adjust to her life as a widow while she accepted the possibility that she, too, might one day receive her own dire medical diagnosis. Which she does. But first, the good news. A caustic op-ed about the indignities of widowhood attracts the attention of a man from her college years, and in typical Sister Nora rom-com fashion, a long-distance relationship ensues. Peter's love and support is just what the doctor ordered, especially when said doctor is an oncologist who does indeed give Ephron the news that she, like Nora, also has leukemia. Ephron's harrowing account of coping with multiple, agonizing courses of treatment rivals that of any against-all-odds, true-adventure memoir. Her endurance is nothing short of mind boggling, her survival to tell the tale even more miraculous. Simultaneously spiritually uplifting and emotionally draining, Ephron's account of triumphing over life's greatest challenges is itself a tour de force.

      COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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