NOW A NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER
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.
βIn my reckless and undiscouraged youth,β Lillian Boxfish writes, βI worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Streetβ¦β
She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macyβs to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, βin some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it.β
Now itβs 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. Itβs chilly enough out for her mink coat and Manhattan is grittier nowβher son keeps warning her about a subway vigilante on the prowlβbut 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 changedβand has not.
Lillian figures she might as well take her time. For now, after all, the night is still young.
βTransportingβ¦witty, poignant and sparkling.β
βPeople (People Picks Book of the Week), ISBN13: 9781250113320 ISBN10: 1250113326 Material Type: hardcover