Love & miracles
Delia Ephron, the screen-writer, novelist and wit, was in her apartment in Greenwich Village in New York City when I phoned. She was disappointed we weren’t doing the interview via video. “That’s too bad. I look fabulous.”
She is appearing, virtually, at this month’s Auckland Writers Festival. She will look fabulous. Count on it.
She has lived for decades in her apartment, initially with her late second husband, Jerome Kass, and now her third, Peter Rutter. (Of the first husband the less said the better. When she told him she wanted to be a writer, he said: “Suppose you become famous? I don’t want you to become famous.”) The apartment, and the village, are as much characters in her memoir, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life, as Jerry and Peter and the author and her many girlfriends and a horrible doctor or two and some borderline stalker-type men. I said I felt I had already visited her at home. She said: “That’s a compliment. Thank you.”
The title comes from the instruction she gives to visitors: to turn “left on Tenth” St, which is a very New York sort of direction.
She adores Tenth St, which she says is “as
