Delia Ephron on How Grief, Cancer and Late in Life Love Inspired Her Real-Life Broadway Rom-Traum ‘Left on Tenth’

variety.com:

Rebecca Rubin Senior Film and Media Reporter Delia Ephron invented a term — discardia — for indulging without guilt at New York City’s too-many tempting eateries. “It’s a game you play with yourself.

You can buy anything you want to eat, but then you have to throw it away halfway through,” she says over a cappuccino and a slice of almond cake at a Greenwich Village hotel. “And that’s how I have managed the bakeries.” Ephron, the 80-year-old author and co-writer of “You’ve Got Mail,” adores the Big Apple, where she was born and spent most of her adult life.

It’s also a place on which she and her late sister Nora Ephron — the Oscar-nominated “When Harry Met Sally” scribe who died of cancer in 2012 — have indelibly left their mark through those timeless ’80s and ’90s romantic comedies. “What I love about the city is that you leave your house and everything’s just there — every kind of food, every kind of person …” Naturally, it’s the setting of her new play “Left on Tenth,” which opened on Broadway this fall.

Adapted from her 2022 memoir about several late-in-life, axis-tilting events, the story begins as Delia (portrayed by Julianna Margulies) writes a New York Times op-ed about her frustration with Verizon after losing her husband of more than three decades, Jerry, to cancer.