By Delia Ephron — Little Brown and Company, 2022
You likely know the name Delia Ephron from her novels and screenplays and for producing (with sister Nora) blockbusters like You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Her recent memoir begins with the loss of her beloved husband, Jerry, to prostate cancer. They’d been married since 1982, and she admits she never expected to find love again. But a series of confluences put her in the path of Peter, a man with whom she felt an instant connection. (They had gone on a blind date 50 years ago!) Now both widowed in their 70s, they were delighted at the prospect of love a second time around. And then came the diagnosis: Delia had AML, the same type of leukemia that savagely took her sister Nora just years before. Despite that, Delia and Peter married in the hospital before she underwent an experimental treatment that had her hospitalized for 100 days, in pain so consuming she often wished to die. Though that sounds grim, this story has a happy ending that will charm and move you.
