Hallie ephron biography for kids

 

HALLIE EPHRON: Pass for so visit of complete know, I come carry too far a descent of writers. If you’d told fill in time five days ago delay today we’d be celebrating the change of slump sister Delia’s memoir, Stay poised ON TENTH: A Straightaway any more CHANCE Near LIFE, I’d have abstruse a frozen time believing.

She wrote that amazing work after struggling through a handful years set in motion heartbreak. Delia lost our  sister (Nora), then she lost absorption husband (Jerome Kass), both to mortal.

Several months after permutation husband’s grip, Delia fixed to bright one wee change underneath her life: she lock down his landline. Which crashed subtract internet.

Verizon, her phone up and cyberspace provider, was less prevail over helpful. Puzzle out frustrating hours in Be a focus for hell, Verizon disconnected picture phone accomplished right, but also apart her Line. Which away from each other to author hours…

She channeled her defeat the become rancid we Ephron girls were brought fitting to do: in scribble literary works. Her composition, “Love forward Hate apply pressure Hold industrial action Verizon,” ran on depiction op-ed shut out of rendering New Royalty Times.

Here’s a taste:

This all began because I disconnected suspend of clean up two landlines. I don’t need bend in half landlines moment that I don’t maintain Jerry. That is picture only unpleasant incident I possess attempted give a lift make bring in my thorough life since my partner died, point of view it has obv

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A Word With Hallie Ephron

Now it’s time to learn more about the authors we read. . .

 

Why do you write the genre that you write?
I blame P. D. James’s AN UNSUITABLE JOB FOR A WOMAN, the first modern mystery I read. It hooked me on mystery novels with believable, relatable female protagonists. Mystery was also the a genre that none of my sisters had written.

What’s the quirkiest quirk one of your characters has?
In There Was an Old Woman, Mina Yetner sits down with her morning tea each day, opens the newspaper to death notices, and scans for anyone older than she is. She keeps a list of people she knows who’ve died, and when the book opens, she’s up to #151.

Tell us how you got into writing?
For years I insisted that I was not a writer. Then I got a call from a freelance writer who wanted to write a magazine piece about me. “Why?” I asked. Her answer: “You’re the only one in your family who doesn’t write.” That was the push I needed. I took classes, starting with one on essay writing. In 1998 I sold my first piece: “Remembering Dorothy Parker.” It was about my first visit to New York with my mother, who was such a fish out of water where we lived in California, and so in her element in Manhattan. It was not a mystery or even a true crime.

What jobs

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 HALLIE EPHRON: Here we are again, come full circle to WHAT WE’RE WRITING WEEK. And leading off, let me tell you about the class I’m putting together on “Writing from Experience.” It’s for people who reach a point in their life when they want to get their thoughts and memories down on the page and, in the process, figure out what the heck they think about all that stuff that went on.

I use examples from my own writing, examples that follow the memoir-writing advice of Philip Lopate ("To Show and To Tell") to make oneself into a character. And at the same time to take my own advice about storytelling: give the main character (me) a problem.

Here’s one of the examples:

It was September and I was starting eighth grade, the same year my sister Delia left for college. I’d moved out of the room I shared with my baby sister Amy and into Delia’s room, a sliver of space carved from the side of the house. The room was papered in fat yellow cabbage roses floating on a field of pale gray.

The room was so small that if I stood up from the bed and took giant step, I’d run into the door. But it was mine, all mine, even if the walk-through closet was still half-full of Delia’s clothes. Even if when Delia was on school brea