This is fresh air, I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Delia Efren writes that when she fell in love with her husband, Dr. Peter

Rudder, when she was 72, she thought she'd fallen into her own romantic comedy.

She writes them for a living.

With her sister Nora Efren, she wrote the film you've got male and was a contributing

writer to Nora's screenplay, Sleepless in Seattle.

But the romantic comedy of Delia's own life was circumscribed by death.

Nora met Peter, a psychiatrist and youngy and psychotherapist, through a New York Times

op-ed, she wrote, relating to the recent death of her husband's screenwriter, Jerry

Cass.

They'd been married over 30 years.

Peter read the op-ed, felt there were many confluences between Delia's story and his

own, and got in touch.

That's how the relationship started.

Delia was still recovering from the death of her husband and the death five years earlier

of her sister Nora, who had a particularly virulent kind of leukemia that runs in families.

Delia was diagnosed with it just a few months after she and Peter fell in love.

The treatment nearly killed her.

There's enough bad news in this world, so I'll tell you right at the start that Delia

not only survived, it's very unlikely she'll have a recurrence.

Her marriage to Peter survived the ordeal too.

Delia Efren's new memoir is called Left Untenth, a second chance at life.

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