Daddy’s Girl : When Delia Ephron’s father faced death, it was her he called. And called. Writing a novel helped her come to terms with their painful relationship

You wouldn’t expect such a sensible person to be like this. Through no fault of her own, Delia Ephron keeps finding herself toe to toe with that relentless fact of contemporary life: the mighty trend.

In the ‘70s, it was divorces. Ephron had one. Then everyone else did too.

Later it was dogs. Ephron acquired one. Then bestseller lists and movie sets were invaded by them.

“I’m horrified to notice that everything I do turns out to be trendy, that I never seem to have any true individuality,” Ephron says, as proof of her assimilation--Daisy, her coffee-colored terrier mix--trots into the sunny kitchen of her home somewhere on the Westside. (“It’s adjacent to everything--Beverly Hills adjacent, Beverlywood adjacent. It’s very embarrassing from that point of view.”)

And now the witty, best-selling author (“How to Eat Like a Child”) and screenwriter (co-script doctor on “Sleepless in Seattle”) is surfing the next wave of her generation with her first adult novel, “Hanging Up.” The semi-autobiographical book, which has been bathed in warm reviews, traces the complicated relationship between the winning Eve Mozell and her waning father, Lou, a former sitcom writer who barrages her with phone calls and demented demands from his nursing home bed.

The book echoes Ephron’s experiences with her father, Henry, who wrote a sheaf of successful films with his wife, Phoebe, including the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle “Desk Set,” “Carousel” and “Daddy Long Legs,” which starred Fred Astaire. As the “daddy’s girl” of the four Ephron sisters, Delia early on shouldered much of the burden of dealing with his alcoholic and manic-depressive episodes, a role that re-emerged as he was dying.

“Your childhood roles start to come back when your parents get sick,” Ephron says, perched on a couch in her pastel-washed living room sprinkled with funky collectibles. “I don’t know why they do. I started to remember feelings about him and my anger, resentment and everything that I had put away.

“I considered myself a highly well-adjusted person, and I really love my life. My father was impossible, but basically I dealt with it. It was OK. But when he started to really die, I would go see him and it was as if I saw him when I was young and he was drunk. He wasn’t drunk. He was dying.”

Newsweek applauded “Hanging Up” as “a terrific debut,” and the New York Times called it a “compassionate, funny and tremendously satisfying” account of Eve’s dealings with an elderly father who was “nothing but trouble . . . a lifetime’s supply of embarrassments and small offenses.”

Ephron is not alone. As they usher their aging parents closer to mortality, it’s the baby boomers’ disturbing lot to be making the acquaintance of their own. In “Hanging Up,” the middle-aged heroine nearly faints from the sight of her own sagging tushie and imagines turning a flagging memory into fun and profit with a game show for people over 40--”Name That Person You Already Know.”

In real life, Ephron, who says only that she’s older than her 44-year-old protagonist, detected disconcerting parallels between herself and her father during his last days at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Hospital in Woodland Hills. He died three years ago at 81.

“Somebody said to me, ‘He has the dwindles,’ ” she says. “I loved that so much I just never forgot it, and then I realized I had the dwindles too. His were a much more advanced case, but I also did, and that as a novel took shape in my head.”

The afternoon is sultry, but Ephron is comfortably dressed in a black top and loose pants patterned like tiny graph paper. Her wavy brown hair falls like puppy ears around her face, which breaks into easy smiles. Indeed, of the lively Ephron sisters, Delia--the second oldest, after Nora--was considered “the nice one,” as is her character Eve. (The other sisters are Amy, also a writer, who executive produced “A Little Princess,” and Hallie Touger, who is trying to jump-start a writing career while she works for a computer company in Cambridge, Mass.) Delia’s toastiness curried a special relationship with her father, but the closeness turned around and bit her on the butt.

Henry Ephron called her. A lot.

He would call Delia.

He would call Nora.

He would call Delia again, forgetting he’d already called her.

“Some part of me was conditioned from a very young age to expect these calls, and I must say I was never let down,” Ephron says with a laugh. “I said to him, ‘You’ve got to stop calling,’ and he said, ‘I live half my life in the real world and half on the phone.’ And it was so powerful to me, that statement, that his entire real life disappeared when he got on the phone. His loneliness went away. His anxiety went away. For all I know, his desire to have a drink went away.”

The novel escapes grimness, trading on Ephron’s peculiar ability to write about painful things in a funny way. Her stiletto wit is particularly pointed in drawing the intrepid and imperious Georgia, the older sister/editor of Georgia Magazine--which is never “afraid to sound stupid if it’s smart.”

She’s Nora. And not Nora.

“Actually, the details of Georgia aren’t the details of Nora’s life at all,” Ephron says. “But Nora is awesomely confident and has the effect of both terrifying you and comforting you at the same time because of it.”

Nora says she loved her counterpart.

“My father isn’t the only member of our family who’s a great comic character,” she says, “and there are things that just made me howl, that aren’t things I ever said but definitely things I might have because I’m so famously bossy.”

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In fact, the sisters love each other’s work. They collaborated on the screenplay for Nora’s directing debut, “This Is My Life,” as well as for “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Mixed Nuts.” And last week, they started on one for “Hanging Up.” Tri-Star has optioned it, with Nora directing.

“We really have an awfully good time working together, partly because it seems to me we share about 43% of our brains,” Nora says. “We have the same references and the same history.”

Indeed, for sisters who are both celebrated as sharp and entertaining writers, they seem remarkably noncompetitive. Especially for a family whose patriarch delighted in calling one sister to gloat about another’s accomplishment. Usually that meant Nora, who was riding the bullet train to success, first in journalism and later in film as a writer and director.

“He didn’t just do it on the phone,” Delia says. “He’d do it in a group--’Are you jealous of your sister?’ Right out there. I remember I actually had to think about that, because I’m not jealous of my sister, and the reason is because I’m the middle child. I was always afraid she’d be jealous of me because it would upset the balance of power.”

And the personal power pool in the Ephron family was fairly vast. They passed witticisms like salt around the family table in Beverly Hills. Their successful screenwriting mother, Phoebe--mirrored in the icy mom of “Hanging Up”--was a forceful figure who insisted that her girls transcend ‘50s expectations.

“She had a lot of vision for the family,” Delia says. “Her daughters were all going to be successful women. ‘You’ll leave home, you’ll go to college, you’ll go to New York, you’ll have careers.’ She was full of goals, and we were different from all the other girls around.”

Both parents were also alcoholics, a painful legacy Delia explores in “Hanging Up.” Phoebe Ephron died of cirrhosis in 1971. For a long time, the subject was taboo, even for the Ephrons, who like to mine the family lore. The parents’ hit Broadway play, “Take Her, She’s Mine” was inspired by Nora’s letters home from Wellesley College. Nora’s roman a clef and film, “Heartburn,” was a withering account of the end of her marriage to Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein.

But “Hanging Up” plows new family ground. “We were very careful about ever saying anything about there ever being any problems when my parents were alive,” Delia Ephron says. “You grow up and you keep the family secrets. But I don’t think it’s your obligation to keep that secret your whole life. Time passes and it’s so much of the fabric of your life and who you are that when you write a novel, I think you have to write from the heart.”

Ephron attended Beverly Hills High School and then went east, graduating from Barnard College. Like Eve Mozell, she worked as an events planner for a parks department. At 25, she got married “because someone asked me and I did it, for all the wrong reasons. . . . The women’s movement came along and rescued me.”

Ephron spent a good chunk of her youth resisting the family’s forte. While her husband taught philosophy at Brown University, she ran a crochet business.

“I just wasn’t going to be a writer. I didn’t know what I was going to be, but I wasn’t going to be that. Then when I was about 28, I realized my life had a beginning, middle and an end. I thought, ‘I have to become a writer now or I’m never going to become a writer.’ ”

She left her marriage, moved back to New York and gave herself a two-year deadline to launch herself as a writer. She met it in her early 30s with the fanciful “How to Eat Like a Child and Other Lessons in Not Being a Grown-Up,” which offered advice on ways to eat peas and torture your sister. It made a splash in the New York Times Magazine and led to a book contract.

“It just changed my life overnight,” she says.

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Not only did Delia become a writer, she managed to claim her own professional identity. She says she was particularly influenced by Nora.

“I tried to do everything she did,” Delia Ephron says. “Our gifts are similar. I think until I wrote ‘How to Eat Like a Child,’ which seemed completely me, I didn’t really know where she stopped and I began. I didn’t know that I had my own voice as a writer and how strong a voice it was until I wrote that and looked at it and went, ‘Oh, this is something that nobody else would have written.’ ”

Ephron, who considers her special writing purview to be family, moved back to Los Angeles 15 years ago to complete one when she married television writer and producer Jerome Kass.

She churned out seven humorous books for children and adults, including the best-selling “Teenage Romance” and “Funny Sauce: Us, the Ex, the Ex’s New Mate, the New Mate’s Ex and the Kids,” inspired by her experience as a stepmom. (The Ephron sisters have a taste for concise but nutritious book titles: Delia’s “Funny Sauce” is counterpointed by Nora’s “Crazy Salad” and Amy’s “Bruised Fruit.”)

But it wasn’t until G.P. Putnam’s Editor Faith Sale picked her brain over drinks in New York three years ago that Ephron considered writing a grown-up novel.

“I told her this idea I had for a novel without thinking I would ever write it, and the next day she offered me a contract,” Ephron says. “And I thought, ‘Well, if I don’t take it, I’ll never do it. I’ll never write a novel.’ So I just took it and wrote it.”

And while Henry Ephron rested in peace, writing the novel had the unexpected bonus of helping Delia Ephron make peace with his memory.

“There was so much pain in my relationship with my father,” she says, “because to have a father hospitalized and other things involved in dealing with somebody who was drinking, it’s easier to write about it than to speak about it. And I began to think it was a gift, this relationship, because I got to write this book and I loved writing the book. I got to understand in a more in-depth way what my relationship with my father was about.”