Art is different from life. In art, one can perfect the absolute madness and mess of real life. Edges can be whittled down to soft round spaces. Tears can become smiles, and all is right with the world. When Delia and Nora Ephron wrote films, taking after their famous screenwriting parents, they took life’s crumbles and turned them into a hilarious cake --- whole, romantic and beautiful. Neither of them assumed that their real lives could take on some of those actual qualities and change bad for better. Until it did.

LEFT ON TENTH is Delia Ephron’s account of how she was granted a renewed sense of life after the hard-hitting losses of both her beloved sister and her first husband, Jerry, to cancer. As the planet deals with some pretty heavy grief and misery, it is a bright beacon of hope that there is always the chance that something better and beautiful still may live on the other side of a ravaged road.

"LEFT ON TENTH is a charming, funny and compassionate account of one woman’s grasping at the low and high boughs of life...and experiencing a journey that ends up with the storyteller picking up pen and paper and starting to write again."

“If you are in Manhattan traveling downtown in a car on Fifth Avenue or Seventh Avenue and you want to turn onto Tenth Street, you have to turn left. It’s a one-way street, west to east. LEFT ON TENTH is my way home. I was left on Tenth when my husband died, and after that, life took many left turns, some perilous, some wondrous. This book is about all of them.”

And this is where we find Delia. Coping with the death of Jerry, one of the kindest people she ever knew, was hard enough. She writes of the end of his life with full-on reportorial accuracy. It is clear that she was grateful to have been loved so long in such a kind and compassionate way, since her parents were difficult and filled with their own troubles. Delia was still dealing with Nora’s death from leukemia, and we get the full meal of pain to which she was exposed during those years.

Writing a New York Times op-ed about this pain was her unknowing ticket to her new life. Its publication and the revelation that she was indeed now a widow brought forth a great deal of sympathy. However, she was not prepared for the reconnection she made with an old beau, Peter, a California psychiatrist she hadn’t seen in 54 years. He read the piece and got in touch with her. They texted, talked, and fell gratefully and insanely in love with each other.

So LEFT ON TENTH could have been just a nice little book about a second chance at love. Instead, as the subtitle tells us, it actually gave her a second chance at life itself. Peter came to New York to be with her, and for four months her life seemed like something she and her sister would concoct --- a perfect ending to a sad story. Until she found out that she had AML, a fierce leukemia. The new dream suddenly darkened and became a stormy nightmare instead.

There are plenty of books about late-in-life romance and medical disasters. But LEFT ON TENTH is written by a storyteller, so that a visit to a doctor where the process for bone marrow transplants is being discussed, is at once educational and sweet. Delia begins to replace hope with fear, and then fear with hope. As she muddles through her long journey back to health, she has plenty of time to rediscover true and ineffable kindness and compassion through Peter, her friends and her youngest sister, Hallie. The life that she once lived was gone and replaced with so much more than she had bargained for.

So, in this respect, the book is both a cautionary tale and a gentle lecture on the fact that no one knows how long they have on this earth. Plans seem ridiculous, yet Delia continues to make them --- and in that, her hope and ability to love intensely take all of us through the story feeling quietly grateful for our own perhaps smaller dramas.

LEFT ON TENTH is a charming, funny and compassionate account of one woman’s grasping at the low and high boughs of life --- an enthusiastic child and a wizened adult both --- and experiencing a journey that ends up with the storyteller picking up pen and paper and starting to write again. There could not be a more perfect circle.