Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

Fall 2016 Library Journal Editors' Pick In my reckless and undiscouraged youth, Lillian Boxfish writes, I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy s to become the highest paid adv [...]
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Fall 2016 Library Journal Editors' Pick In my reckless and undiscouraged youth, Lillian Boxfish writes, I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy s to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it. Now it s the last night of 1984 and Lillian, 85 years old but just as sharp and savvy as ever, is on her way to a party. It s chilly enough out for her mink coat and Manhattan is grittier now her son keeps warning her about a subway vigilante on the prowl but the quick-tongued poetess has never been one to scare easily. On a walk that takes her over 10 miles around the city, she meets bartenders, bodega clerks, security guards, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be, while reviewing a life of excitement and adversity, passion and heartbreak, illuminating all the ways New York has changed and has not. A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.Lillian figures she might as well take her time. For now, after all, the night is still young."