My younger brother, Oliver, said in a recent interview about his collages, “Each piece is a record of decisions…and some works contain thousands of decisions. It’s basically a fingerprint, something that’s uniquely you.” When I look at the details in his art, I recognise traces of those decisions, of who he is and who he has been. I see faint lines that remind me of his teenage art project, that’s still collecting dust in our parents’ garage. I see the influence of an artist or album cover he discovered as a kid, or a sentence that echoes a lyric he wrote at sixteen. I look at his work and feel the great depth of my knowledge of him; an intimacy built on hundreds of layers of experiences and silliness and bickering and memories. It reminds me who I am and have been, too.
In his essay, The Science of Siblings, Jeffrey Kluger writes, “[Our brothers and sisters] are our scolds, protectors, goads, tormentors, playmates, counsellors, sources of envy, objects of pride. They teach us how to resolve conflicts and how not to; how to conduct friendships and when to walk away from them.” He argues that, as well as our genes, parents and peers, it is our sibling dynamics that shape us. This has certainly been true for me. It has been for this week’s guest Delia Ephron, too. In her relationships with three sisters — including the writer Nora Ephron — Delia has found comfort and competition, similarity, difference and security. Below we explore how all these things contribute to the beautiful multiplicity of the sibling bond. And also how it felt to fall in love in her seventies after experiencing loss — of Nora and her second husband, Jerry — and an illness she wasn’t expected to survive.
Why are you particularly drawn to writing about love and relationships?
Doesn’t everyone who writes fiction write about love and relationships? I’ve always tried to work from my heart. I never think, Oh, people are writing about vampires, I’ll write about a vampire. I’ve never been young and hip, so I can be old and unhip. I try to think, what do I know? What can I understand? And I understand that relationships are at the centre of life.
Do you think that’s linked to growing up with a family of writers and observing dynamics between people from a young age?
There were four sisters [in my family] and we’re all published writers. When I was young, the dinner table was a lively place where you told your stories. My father would often shout, “That’s a great line, write it down.” My mother was obsessed with the English language, too. She always had feminist ideas: you will grow up, you will have a career. She never mentioned marriage or children, she just talked about our futures. It was all about ambition, really. And I think Nora had the most powerful dose of that, being the oldest.
The other thing that informed me was that, when I was 11, both of my parents slipped into a terrible alcoholic catastrophe. Our house was not a happy place. I never slept at night, because there was so much rage and screaming. My parents were crazy together, I kept hoping they would split up. I didn’t understand that they couldn’t live without each other. All of that made me hypersensitive to human relationships. I would notice anything, like how a coat was thrown on the couch. Was it an angry throw? What was coming next? If you’re the child of alcoholics, you watch everything, every minute. That’s the weirdest thing: it screwed me up in a bunch of ways, but it also fed my talent for observation.
Do you still notice every detail in that anxious way today? Or has it become easier with age?
Everything gets set in childhood. I’m an anxious person, no question about it. I’ve been living in a very safe, wonderful home, with a wonderful husband, but I definitely can go from one to 100 very fast. I was also a funny, sensitive kid to begin with.
I will say that I was terribly sick about three years ago. I wasn’t expected to survive, and that was very transforming in terms of love, that’s for sure. My husband of 35 years, Jerry Kass, had died. And a year and a half later, a few months before I got sick, I met Peter. Nora set us up when I was 18 — she met him when he worked at Newsweek. It’s weird, because I do not remember those dates. He went to my parents’ play with me and he has a memory of us talking in the hallway of the Algonquin hotel. I do remember a football game we went to, but I don’t remember him at it. It’s driving me crazy, because I’m absolutely mad about him!
How did you meet again in your seventies?
I was on the phone to this horrible company called Verizon for a week, trying to disconnect my late husband’s phone. In a rage I wrote a funny piece about it for the New York Times. Peter read it — his wife had died the year before — and he wrote a wonderful email to me. We connected immediately. And then, five months later, I found out I had leukaemia. Peter said, “Well, let’s get married right now.” So we did. We went to the marriage bureau, got our licence, stopped at this antiques store on the corner of my block and bought a ring. I checked into the hospital on the Monday, and started my chemotherapy and got married there on the Tuesday.
How beautiful.
It was and it wasn’t. It’s hard for me to look at the pictures. The wedding was on the fancy floor of the hospital. It had a dining room, and we invited 10 or 11 friends, people I really loved. But I was still sick, and I didn’t know if I would survive it.
I guess I meant beautiful in terms of how unexpected life can be, that you could find love in that moment.
Oh my god, yes. I don’t even understand it, because although Peter’s a psychiatrist he also went to medical school. He’s a doctor, so he’s totally comfortable in hospitals. I’ve never felt so taken care of. Talk about love, honestly, he was there every minute.
How was falling in love in your seventies similar or different to meeting your first husband when you were 20?
It wasn’t similar to meeting my first husband. That was a ridiculous situation. I don’t think we were ever in love, either of us, we were just both needy. But falling in love with Peter was very much like falling in love with [my second husband] Jerry. We understood each other. It was instantaneous, passionate. Honestly, passion is not any different at 72. But one thing that is different, I think, is I’m nicer now. I’m not as critical. Of course, Peter saved my life when he was in the hospital every day, so if I weren’t nicer I don’t know what sort of human I would be. But I think there’s a way in which I have lost an edge, if you know what I mean? I’m not worried about other things anymore. I also know how lucky I am to have met him at this point in life.
When you found out you were sick, were you worried about Peter going through that again? Because you’d both lost partners, and you knew what it took to care for somebody through sickness.
My sister had died of leukaemia, so I was being tracked for it. I knew it was possible that I could get it too. Because both our partners had died of cancer and it was brutal to go through that, I said to Peter when we met, “No one should have to go through twice what we both went through. If I get sick, I give you permission to leave me.” I didn’t really mean it, but I said it. And he said, “I could never do that.” He is a loyal person, but I’ll tell you, I think it would be very hard to survive that loss again. I try not to think about it. He’s much stronger than me.
Do you wish Nora could see you and Peter now, given she set you up all those years ago?
Oh yes, it’s just one more moment when she was right! She’d be so happy. It’s crazy that Nora introduced us. He came blessed by my sister — how incredible. And she was such a force in my life. I remember her editing my first piece. She really mothered me, and that was great because my mother never did. So she was not just my sister — she was also my mother.
You once wrote about Nora, "How did I find my way when she took up so much space?" and I wondered, especially as you were both writers, how did you find your way?
By writing. When I wrote my first piece I thought, nobody else would have written this. Okay, you’ve got to always go for who you are — that’s how I did it. It was always an issue…well, not always. What happens is that you feel fine, but the world perceives you as a sibling. So even when I wasn’t in any way thinking that anything I wrote was anything Nora would ever write, the world saw [me] as a younger sibling. Nora and I had so much fun when we collaborated, too. But you’re fighting that perception.
How did her illness change the dynamic in your relationship? Because she was your older sister, was it difficult to see her become fragile?
Listen, if you get as sick as she did and you don’t tell anyone, you’re pretty strong. When I got sick my daughter said, “Don’t let anyone know because they’re going to think what happened to her is going to happen to you.” But I couldn’t talk to people and pretend I was not where I was mentally. Nora was able to do that for years. I both admired and wondered about it. If anyone had known she could never have directed Julie & Julia, because she wouldn’t have passed the tests for insurance, so there were good reasons. But it was too much deceit for me. It didn’t suit me. I think you are more profoundly different from your siblings than you are from your friends.
What other ways are siblings different from friends?
A really great friendship has a kind of purity to it that siblings just can’t. They’re always vying for position in the house, even when the house is no longer there and the parents are gone. There’s some way that we’re so critical of each other. We know everything about each other: whose thighs are cuter, who has better ankles. I never [made those] comparisons with my friends. Of course my family was very critical, but I don’t think siblings are safe places for everyone. I must say, I talk to my siblings every week. I miss them. But it’s different from my girlfriends. There are rules in friendship, and not in sibling [relationships].
You once said children in the same family have different parents. Did you have a different version of your parents to your sisters?
We’re born into a family at a different time in the marriage. My oldest sister had 14 good years, I had 11, my youngest sister had three. That creates different childhoods. We don’t relate to our parents in the same way. Sometimes one of you is close to one parent, but not a favourite. All parents say they don’t have favourites, but I think they do.
There’s a piece I wrote about my mother, which I don’t think I could have written when Nora was alive. Because there’s something about the difference in how our mother was with each of us. Like when [she was ill] she said to Nora, “Take notes,” and it became this huge thing. To me she said, “I hated crocheting” — and I had just published a book about crocheting. That’s very different. But also, “Take notes”? She didn’t say, “I’m sorry I’m leaving you,” or, “Are you okay?” or, “I don’t want to die.” It is the least intimate thing you could say to your daughter. People would quote it to me, and I’d think, those were your last words? I don’t know. My relationship with my mother was a different one.
What’s your favourite thing about having sisters?
The security of it. They prepared me for friendship in a way, in what I would want and what wasn’t right, but it was more than that. Each one of them is special in a different way. Having said that, my [second] husband, Jerry, stopped speaking to his sister when he was 25 and largely never spoke to her again. She was such a meanie. Just because you’re related to someone there’s no reason to like them. That was one of my mother’s favourite lines — she was so cold-blooded. But I don’t feel that way. Also, when you have difficult parents, a sibling is someone who shares the bond and the pain, and my sisters and I have all helped each other at different points. It was incredible that the four of us got through that together. So I’m very glad I grew up with siblings. It’s enriched my life in a million ways.
I’m interested to know how your friendships have or haven’t changed in your 70s…do you see friends more often, in a way that perhaps you couldn’t always in your thirties or forties, when everyone was busy with work or kids or parents?
I didn’t really start life until my 30s. I got married as soon as I could, when I was 20. I can’t believe I did that. I wasn’t going to be a writer, either. I was avoiding everything I was meant to do. Then I realised I was throwing my life away. I do think you can mess your 20s up a bit and recover. That’s a decade people make a lot of mistakes in; I did anyway. Then I pulled myself together, went to New York, and said to myself, I’m either going to become a writer in a year or I’ll be out of money and then I’ll do something else.
The thing about writing is it tells you who you are. I learnt who I was from writing in a way that I didn’t from living. So I started making close new friends from the time I was 30. I have stepchildren who were quite a handful, but they were very young when I married Jerry, and a lot of my close friends have kids and a lot of them don’t. I don’t think there was an obsession with children the way there is now. It seems to be this thing, everybody’s obsessed with them. I don't get it! But I have always had the best and most wonderful friends who have stayed with me over the years. Friendship is one of the most important things in life; it’s certainly about love. My girlfriends were magical when I was sick, too. One thing that's different now is I am more worried about all of us losing each other. That’s a horrible thing that happens with time.
Thinking of loss, did losing Nora and Jerry change the way you decided or wanted to live?
Those years when Nora and Jerry were sick were horrible. I thought they would die at the same time, but Jerry died in 2015, Nora in 2012. Something Jerry always said was, “All we have is process”. He meant it in terms of writing: you know whether you love a piece of work, but you cannot know what will happen once it’s out there, so all you own is the process. You have to love the writing of it, because its fate is out of your hands. But it’s really about living, isn’t it? You don’t know whether anything you like will last. All you have is this day.
I know you were a writer on You’ve Got Mail. Did you know how special it was when you were working on it? And what do you think made that film resonate with so many of us?
Well, first of all it’s based on the most magnificent material in the world: the movie The Shop Around the Corner and the musical She Loves Me. Second of all, Meg and Tom were a divine romantic comedy couple. If you make a mistake casting your leads in romantic comedies, it’s never going to be magical, it doesn’t matter who they are. And Meg and Tom were magical together.
The thing about a movie is there are so many things that can not work. It’s one reason why it’s an exhausting, thrilling and depressing experience, sometimes all at once. But sometimes, everything works. And that’s just like love, right? It’s this magical thing. But I don’t think we knew. The script was quite different, there were many more story blocks that dropped out, and even more that dropped out in the editing process. It wasn’t an easy one.
I think what Nora understood is that a good romantic comedy is smart. It’s really about the way people relate to each other; it’s about the world that we live in; and it’s about friendship, as well as love. There’s a substance to the movies she directed that isn’t in most romantic comedies. Most are funny, but they don’t make you think about life. Nora was so smart about that. I loved doing [those films] and god knows my work is really in them, but I was on a ride with her. And that’s why I’ve always written my books.
What do you miss about her the most?
Oh, the fun. She was just so much fun. What’s she up to right now, I wonder? Because even if you were meeting her somewhere and her flight was cancelled, she would somehow take the next plane. She would not do what I would do, which is say, ”Oh forget it,” and go home. She would be there. And if you thought you were having dinner with one person it was usually six, because Nora loved a party. She loved to feed you, things would always arrive. She lived in a very big way. I’m a more introverted person, but I sure loved having it around me. She loved and took care of me, too, and I miss the love. I miss loving her.
What do you wish you’d known about love?
How much generosity is necessary. And that life is long, you have to keep reinventing it, and love is one of the ways you do that.
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*Siracusa by Delia Ephron
*Nick Cave’s love pencils
Especially “Rain your kisses down in storms”.
*This collage by my brother
...called, 'I thought she said, here you glow'
*Trullo's recipe for orecchiette with purple sprouting broccoli, chilli and anchovy
*Twenty Twenty
A pop culture podcast reflecting on the year 2000 by critics Simran Hans and Tara Joshi. I loved the Gilmore Girls episode.
*Clean by Soccer Mommy
This album came out three years ago, but I’ve only just started listening to it and it might replace Best Coast as my summer walking album.
*Bagels from Spence Bakery
Worth the (very long) queue
*This Delia Ephron quote, which inspires me to make the day matter:
"I hate to waste a day. ... What I feel now, and I feel much more strongly certainly since Nora's death, is that all we really have is process. How did the work go today? How did the writing go? How did the lunch go with your best friend that you usually love to spend hours talking to? Did you wring every ounce of fun and intimacy out of it? ... When you walked down the street did you notice things? Did you have a good time? Was it crisp out? Was it hot out? What I think happened to me is that I got very focused on the day and making the day matter."
Thank you for reading.
With love,
Natasha xx
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