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"    Photo: Elena Seibert   If the screenwriter and novelist Delia Ephron&amp;#039;s new collection of essays, Sister, Mother, Husband, Dog, had a mission statement, it might be, &amp;quot;All siblings have different parents.&amp;quot; The book is filled with emotionally honest stories about her famous older sister-slash-collaborator, the universally beloved writer and director Nora Ephron, and their tart, difficult, alcoholic mother, Phoebe, who was also a screenwriter. It has shorter, less poignant, but still amusing stories about bad hair days, perfect pets, and Jewish book festivals. Ephron writes most lyrically about finding her way as the younger, less-heralded part of the Nora-Delia screenwriting duo (they worked on, among others, This is My Life, Sleepless in Seattle and You&amp;#039;ve Got Mail together). &amp;quot;We are sisters, collaborators, writer-children of writer-parents who collaborated. How am I not her? How did I find my way when she took up so much space?&amp;quot; Ephron doesn&amp;#039;t sound churlish when she asks these questions, she sounds searching and true. Anyone with siblings has to contend with the roles they play in their own families, and the complex brew of jealousy and pride at their siblings&amp;#039; achievements.  We spoke with Ephron about Nora, the intimacy of sisters (Delia is the second of four Ephron girls; Nora was the oldest), and about how difficult it is to write about your mother, even when she tells you that everything is copy. You are straightforward about your complex relationship with Nora in the book&amp;#039;s first essay &amp;quot;Losing Nora.&amp;quot; It wasn&amp;#039;t sugarcoated. Were the essays about her difficult to write so soon after her death?  Well, I think the whole point of writing this way, which is personal, is to be as honest as you can about the complexity of it all. And at the same time, my relationship with my sister is about love, and it wasn&amp;#039;t difficult to write in the sense that it was comforting to me. Sisterhood is something that I&amp;#039;ve thought about my whole life, and it was such a complex, complicated thing. There&amp;#039;s a kind of intimacy to our relationship, and sisterhood is always difficult. I wanted to get at it. I never like it when things are pretty pictures. My sister was the greatest. She was a fantastic sister, a mentor. We had enormous fun together, as well as creative fun. It was a way to be with Nora, to write the piece. It was really comforting. I didn&amp;#039;t know which direction I was facing in the months just after her death. You&amp;#039;re also quite forthright about your mother&amp;#039;s alcoholism. Writing about my mother was a different sort of a problem. I had avoided writing about my mother [in the past]. My first novel, Hanging Up, is about a difficult parent, but it&amp;#039;s about the relationship with my father. First novels are so autobiographical, but it&amp;#039;s fictionalized enormously. The mother doesn&amp;#039;t figure in it. She&amp;#039;s sort of absent in Hanging Up. They&amp;#039;re divorced in the book, which my parents were not.   Photo: Courtesy of Delia Ephron My mother was a remarkable example of success, but she was always an absolutely self-destructive and really difficult mother. [Like] her famous line about &amp;quot;taking notes.&amp;quot; [On her deathbed, their mother told Nora, &amp;quot;Take notes,&amp;quot; which is to say, even your mother&amp;#039;s death is comedic fodder. Nora used the line in her novel Heartburn.] I realized you start to romanticize your parents in certain ways, and I didn&amp;#039;t think it was healthy. I wanted to write about what it was like, for me, but not my sister, to be in that family, with my mother. I hope this isn&amp;#039;t an impertinent question, but I wonder, was it easier to write about your particular relationship with your mother after Nora was gone?  That&amp;#039;s a painful question. It&amp;#039;s possible I might not have taken the journey [of this book] to begin with [before Nora&amp;#039;s death]. I started with the piece, the long piece, the first one in the book. I didn&amp;#039;t really know what I was writing. Then I was trying out for the Jewish Book Council, so I needed to write something funny about that. Then I started writing about my 20s, and I knew what the book would be called. And that thing about &amp;quot;take notes,&amp;quot; had gotten more romanticized. There&amp;#039;s no question it was sticking in my second-child craw. You collaborated with Nora on screenplays for so long. Do you feel her voice in your head when you write now? I always knew when we started to collaborate that I needed to find my own voice, I write about that in the book. It was the first time I understood who I was and how I was different from her when I wrote &amp;quot;How to Eat Like a Child&amp;quot; [A short piece about children and food published in the New York Times Magazine, which became a book]. I needed to write books, and things that were my own. It was important for my creative life and my emotional life. I&amp;#039;m married to a writer, so he taught me how to write a screenplay. I had no idea how to do it. He was fabulous and all my girlfriends are writers and we all read each other&amp;#039;s work.  Nora always loved my work. I remember showing her &amp;quot;How to Eat Like a Child,&amp;quot; taking the magazine up to her apartment. &amp;quot;This is great,&amp;quot; she said. She was just so loving.  In the essay about Nora, you say that in some ways it&amp;#039;s easier to be intimate with friends. Can you speak more about that that? We pored over our parents lives together, even though we don&amp;#039;t see it the same ways. What I was really getting at was there are some things about yourself that you feel you can easily share with your best friend, but somehow siblings can be less\u2026I can&amp;#039;t speak in general, but for me, there are some things there were much easier to talk about with my best friend, than with Nora or Hallie or Amy. I felt judged sometimes. Siblings judge each other a lot. You can also fall into old, negative patterns with your family. I always find I&amp;#039;m acting like I&amp;#039;m 15 again when I spend more than three days with my parents. That&amp;#039;s why people write movies and books about Thanksgiving. Because within a minute everyone&amp;#039;s either acting like they used to when they were 15, or they&amp;#039;re being treated like they haven&amp;#039;t changed since they were 15. Family life is tricky that way. Are you working on any new screenplays? I have a television project with Meg Wolitzer. I can&amp;#039;t tell you any of the details of that just now. A director just got onto one of my scripts\u2014Ben Lewin, who directed The Sessions\u2014it&amp;#039;s about the romantic life of one of my friends, Susan. It&amp;#039;s about a woman and three men. It&amp;#039;s the story of her life over 25 years. How much life tries to take you down, but it&amp;#039;s about a woman who refuses to go down. It&amp;#039;s called Looking for You.    "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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