Joan Didion knew this when she wrote “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Delia Ephron learned this before writing her new Broadway play, “Left on Tenth.” And most regular folks of a certain age, such as my centenarian mother,

Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher star in this quasi romantic comedy adapted from Ephron’s memoir, which went deeper into her illness and grief.

She eventually chronicled their keyboard courtship in the 2022 memoir “Left on Tenth,” which the author has since adapted into a frothy new Broadway play starring Julianna Margulies (“ER”) and Peter Gallagher (“The O.