I am not quite sure how Lily found my email address, but I am so happy she did...one day I received this intriquing email & found myself so inspired by her note, followed the links to her sites & wowed by what I read, it is an amazing story, I wanted to share this with my beautiful friends, hope you are inspired as much as I ;)
The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal by Lily Koppel
Rescued from a Dumpster on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a discarded diary brings to life the glamorous, forgotten world of an extraordinary young woman. For more than half a century, the red leather diary lay silent, languishing inside a steamer trunk, its worn cover crumbling into little flakes. When a cleaning sweep of a New York City apartment building brings this lost treasure to light, both the diary and its owner are given a second life.
*******
Dear Friends, Colleagues and Bloggers, I am writing to you about the forthcoming publication of my book, THE RED LEATHER DIARY: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal (HarperCollins, April 8, 2008) about my discovery of a young woman's diary, kept in the 1930s, and its return to Florence Wolfson Howitt, its owner, at 90. Please visit the website: www.redleatherdiary.com Recovered from a steamer trunk in a dumpster outside of my apartment building, while working for The New York Times, the journal painted a vivid picture of 1930s New York-horseback riding in Central Park, summer excursions to the Catskills, and an obsession with a famous avant-garde actress. Its nearly two thousand entries, written in faded black ink, captured the passions and ambitions of an intensely creative young woman interested in carving out a place for herself. From 1929 to 1934, not a single day's entry had been skipped. Brief, breathless dispatches filled every page of the five-year chronicle. Compelled by the hopes and heartaches captured in the pages, I set out to find the diary's owner, my only clue the inscription on the frontispiece-"This book belongs to ...Florence Wolfson." A chance phone call from a private investigator led me to Florence, a 90-year-old woman living with her husband of sixty-seven years. Reunited with her diary, Florence journeyed back to the girl she had been, rediscovering a lost self that had burned with artistic fervor. What's equally inspiring is the coming together of two women from different eras but with many things in common, on the same quest to discover themselves through painting and writing. Florence and I, although strangers at the time, were kindred spirits half-a-century apart. I am a 26-year-old writer, born and raised in Chicago. I have been writing for The Times since I graduated from college, starting off doing celebrity reporting, going on to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and eventually carving out my own beat, which is covering the hidden characters of old New York, such as Manhattan's last typewriter repairman and the sleuth who helped me find Florence