What is Kathleen Rooney reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Kathleen Rooney, author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk.

Her entry begins:

My latest novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, takes place in New York City. The title character, Lillian, takes a 10-or-so-mile walk through the rundown Manhattan of New Year’s Eve 1984, and as she does so, she looks back on her life since she arrived there in 1926. I love New York, but I live and walk in Chicago.

I love my city and am always seeking ways to better understand it—the people who live here and why its neighborhoods are the way they are. Currently, I’m reading Natalie Y. Moore’s The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, which is an immensely insightful examination of racism, disinvestment, and inequality and how these factors have historically shaped—and continue to shape—America’s third most-populous city. Walking through Chicago, it’s easy to see that...[read on]

About Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, from the publisher:

“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.

Learn more about the book and author at Kathleen Rooney's website.

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Writers Read: Kathleen Rooney.

--Marshal Zeringue