'Being a teenager is about first times,' she reports. 'First date, first broken heart'
Remember the heartbreak of hickeys? That awful first kiss? Worrying about whether your nose was too big or your toes too ugly? The utter mortification of holding someone's hand when yours was—ickkkk!—sweaty?
Okay, maybe most well-adjusted adults would rather forget about BO and other indignities of adolescent life. But author Delia Ephron has managed to turn the zits and zags of growing up into publishable profit. Her How to Eat Like a Child, a highly popular 1978 paperback, told readers how to properly consume everything from animal crackers ("Eat each in this order—legs, head, body") to cooked carrots ("On way to mouth, drop in lap, smuggle to garbage in napkin"). The slight volume sold 250,000 copies and just last month was turned into a musical special on NBC.
So it was almost inevitable that Ephron, 37, would take on the specters of acne and worse in her just-published sequel, Teenage Romance, or How to Die of Embarrassment (Viking, $9.95). The book harks back to Ephron's own adolescent angst at Beverly Hills High. She was the second of four daughters in a family of overachievers—her screenwriter parents Henry and Phoebe Ephron wrote Carousel and Desk Set and big sister Nora has won acclaim for her collected articles {Crazy Salad). The children were often used as grist for their parents' writing mill. "If you said something witty at the dinner table," Delia recalls, "my father would say, 'That's a great line. I've got to write it down.' "
Now that Delia is an author, she is getting a bit of good-natured revenge. Parents, clumsy males and yucky social studies teachers are among the villains in her slender book illustrated with amiable cartoons by New Yorker artist Edward Koren. Delia offers unerring advice on attending a slumber party ("Offer to pierce somebody's ears; explain that if you put ice on her earlobes, she won't feel a thing"), going on a first date ("Do not go to the bathroom even if you have to") and worrying ("Worry that everyone is in on the joke but you").
To insure her advice was still on target, Ephron interviewed 75 or so teens at secondary schools in New York and California. "They say teens today are more sophisticated, but I believe they're just as nervous and embarrassed as ever," she reports. "The girls still worry about getting pregnant kissing; the boys are as preoccupied as ever with 'getting it.' "
Ephron admits to a rambunctious adolescence. The good times included strolling down school halls with notebook rings in her nose. But her bravado often gave way. She jammed a spiked heel into a date's foot during her first kiss—and then was afraid to move it. "There's no way to grow up without being in some dreadful, middle place," she believes.
Delia managed, nevertheless, to mature into a fairly normal history major at Barnard. At 25, she married a young philosophy professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I., where she started a crafts business. Three crafts books followed. But at 31 and freshly divorced, Delia moved to New York and became a free-lance writer with the help and encouragement of sister Nora ("I love the subject of sibling rivalry," Delia says. "In many ways, it makes the world go round").
One day, while eating chocolate pudding (bottom first, skin last), Delia got the idea for How to Eat Like a Child. A career was launched. Today, having successfully milked the past, she is writing a screenplay for Walt Disney. Ensconced in West L.A., she shares a house with Jerome Kass, a screenwriter who wrote Queen of the Stardust Ballroom for TV.
Despite success, Ephron still tools about in a small Fiat and shops modestly. "What I've earned simply means that I can order the most expensive thing on the menu in a restaurant, if I feel like it," she says. And, of course, she can still eat it like a child.
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