Mindy Withrow

The Red Leather Diary

The Red Leather Diary is the story of one woman tracking down the story of another woman.  Lily Koppel, a New York Times writer, discovers a flaking leather diary among the decades-old detritus her building supers are cleaning out of the basement.  Five years of entries had been faithfully written by a teenager during the 1930s, and as Koppel carefully pages through it, she finds herself drawn into Florence Wolfson’s tempestuous life of books, art, parties, travel, and love affairs.  Determined to return the diary to its author, Koppel engages a private investigator to help her track down Florence – if she is still alive – all the while writing in the Times about the people and places she encounters during her search.

What I like most about this book, written after Koppel meets and begins to interview Florence (then age 91), is that it celebrates a life.  Like Lily Koppel, I believe everyone has a story worth telling.  Though Florence was a writer, especially in her youth, it took Koppel’s interest in her diary to produce a written account of her life.  Koppel combines extensive quotes from the diary, photographs from Florence’s albums (the images are a great asset), and notes from her interviews to tell of both Florence’s younger days and what happened to her in the decades following the last diary entry.  The telling evokes the lost world of New York in the glamorous 30s, a world in which theatres have their own hospitals and young men and women gather in elegant salons to smoke and discuss poetry.  Against this backdrop, Florence grows up with her doctor father and fashion designer mother, runs against Joy Davidman (yes, as in the future wife of C.S. Lewis) for editorship of her college literary journal, and travels alone across Europe in the earliest days of the war.  It is a story worth recording—and reading.

That said, I was left wishing that Florence had told her own story.  The biggest flaw of the book is the awkward style Koppel employs.  She is at her best narrating how she discovered the diary and reunited it with its owner, and when setting up quotes from the diary, allowing Florence to speak for herself.  But there are odd little bits of research—something a critic once said about a particular theatre, for example—that are rightfully brought in to fill out the portrait of the times, but rather than working them into the fabric of what is otherwise an intimate narrative, they stand self-consciously next to it.  At places, it wanders abruptly from one thought to the next, as though Koppel has simply inserted transcripts of rambling interviews instead of working in Florence’s reminiscences where they would better contribute to the flow of the story.  The structure is creative, but also somewhat unwieldy; Florence’s diary narrative and Koppel’s search narrative overlap in some confusion and could have benefitted from a more distinct structure of alternating chapters or voices.

These structural troubles detracted from my overall enjoyment, but as a portrait of an ambitious woman of another generation – often in her own words – it was unusual enough to keep me reading.  That Florence now considers herself Koppel’s “new grandmother” is a testimony to the power of shared story and the value of intergenerational friendship.  It will appeal to readers who appreciate true stories of “ordinary” people, and it will surprise readers who assume all young women of the early twentieth century were interested strictly in domestic pursuits.  The Red Leather Diary released in 2008; a paperback edition issued in January includes an interview with the author and some of Florence’s recent journal entries.

16. February 2009 by Mindy
Categories: Reviews | 1 comment