Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk - Couverture rigide

Extraordinary Hilarious Elegantly written, Rooney creates a glorious paean to a distant literary life and time and an unabashed celebration of human connections that bridge past and future.
Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed)

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.

Extraordinary... Elegantly written, Rooney creates a glorious paean to a distant literary life and time and an unabashed celebration of human connections that bridge past and future.
Publishers Weekly

In my reckless and undiscouraged youth, 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 Macy's department store to become the highest paid advertising woman in the world.

Now it s the last night of 1984 and Lillian, 85 years old but just as sharp as ever, is on her way to a party. It's chilly enough for her mink coat and Manhattan is grittier but the quick-tongued poet has never been one to scare easily. On a walk that takes her over 10 miles around the city, she meets bartenders, shopkeepers, criminals, 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 endured.

A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk 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.

Based on the life of Margaret Fishback, a protofeminist and pioneering ad woman.