Author: Delia Ephron
Year published: 2022
Category: Adult nonfiction (memoir)
Pages: 304 pages
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA (NY)
Summary: 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.
Review: I didn't read the description of this book before I began it; I just remembered a blogger (I am so sorry I don't remember who!) recommended it. Ephron's writing style captured me from the beginning, even though the start of this memoir is a description of her husband's death and her illness. But there is hope through it all (remember, she wrote the memoir, so she lives).
There is a lot of medical detail in this memoir, so it's not for the faint of heart. I feel like I know a bunch of her kind of leukemia now. Modern medicine (and the patients who endure it) is amazing. As are donors. Incredible.
And through it all, the author has the support of an amazing array of close friends and her new husband, Peter. Going through something like this alone must be just awful, and she is lucky to have friends who came to her, supported her, listened to her (and the doctors), and were just... there.
I liked reading this book, which sounds strange given the topic, but in the end, it is a life-affirming read.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Bookish--author talks a lot about her writing process of novels, nonfiction, and movies
- Nonfiction
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