TUESDAY SPARKS: “LILLIAN BOXFISH TAKES A WALK”

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by The Purple Booker.

Today’s feature is a new download:  Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, by Kathleen Rooney.   “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)

 

 

 

Intro:  (The Road of Anthracite)

There once was a girl named Phoebe Snow.  She wore only white and held tight to a violet corsage, an emblem of modesty.  She was not retiring, though, and her life spun out as a series of journeys through mountain tunnels carved from poetry.  I never saw her doing anything besides boarding, riding, or disembarking a train, immaculate always, captivating conductors, enchanting other passengers.

No, there wasn’t.  She was just an advertisement:  the poster girl for the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad.  Her unsoilable Antarctic-colored clothes were proof that the line’s anthracite-powered locomotives were clean-burning, truly—unlike their sooty and outfit-despoiling competitors:

     Her laundry bill for fluff and frill

     Miss Phoebe finds is nearly nil.

     It’s always light, though gowns of white,

     Are worn on Road of Anthracite.

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Teaser:  When the book came out five months later, under the title I desired, it was a smash, selling out its print run within the first thirty days and hurrying through four subsequent printings.  The reading public, at least some of them, wanted a break from the Depression, and found repose in my pose, world-weary but still cheery. (p. 52).

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Synopsis:  “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.

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I like the sound of this quirky character.  What do you think?

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