This is a pretty amazing story. NY Times reporter Lily Koppel finds a bunch of really old junk in the trash, including an eighty-year-old diary written by a New York teenager named Florence in the early 1930s. She tracks down Florence (who's now ninety-two), and together the two of them construct a memoir of Florence's life during the period she wrote the diary. The result is a book called The Red Leather Diary, and it offers a uniquely personal view of the city during the Roaring '20s and, later, the Great Depression. Here's a bit of what Koppel had to say:
It seems like Florence's life was similar to yours in several ways.
Well, we were both painters. Both writers. She was cosmopolitan and cultured and risk-taking and sophisticated, and her life was full of theater and art and an obsession with this avant-garde stage actress, Eva La Gallienne. She hosted a literary salon when she was a nineteen-year-old graduate student at Columbia. She became almost like my guide to New York. Something about her voice was so immediate that it dissolved the time [that separated us].
Read more here.
