Let’s get the back story out of the way. The dumpster diva. Lily Koppel was not yet in the nose-bleed stratosphere of her corporate career, but she was gaining altitude a rung at a time as a bio-journalist for The New York Times, covering (or exposing) such insignificants as Mick Jagger (he’s the lead singer for The Rolling Stones) to James Gandolfini, whose Tony Soprano does a stint as a lifeguard for those who swim with the fishes. Straight out of college, Koppel was schlepping her stuff into her new digs in Manhattan while a crypt in the basement of the old brownstone was being exhumed to make room for all those three wheeled jogger-strollers the mums of newborns are so fond of. Mummies taking precedent over the mummified. Though journalists are notoriously overpaid, Koppel (Ted Koppel is constantly asked if he is related to her – he is not) couldn’t help but wonder if something of value might actually be belly up in the open casket city sanitation had deposited on the street in front of her building, that was rapidly filling with the history from the basement. The investigative reporter investigated.

The result of her archaeological excursion was The Red Leather Diary. Secrets within its disintegrating covers had been entombed for three quarters of a century, Lily Koppel’s lifetime times three. The first entry was written by its 14-year-old authoress in 1929, (the year Wall Street needed a place to crash) with an entry for every single day until it simply ran out of pages, five years later. Voyeuristic to read someone else’s diary? Koppel struggled with that moral dilemma for at least as long as it took to pick the lock. After all, there were two likelihoods bordering on certainties: One, the author of all those intimate details must be long gone; and two, if by chance Florence Wolfson was still alive and their paths would cross, she would be too feeble with such advanced age to punch out Koppel’s lights for the invasion of privacy. But then an amazing thing happened.

As journal-junkie Koppel began reading the entries, she began to feel a kinship with the young woman coming of age within the pages. Here was a gutsy girl with artistic and literary talents, a collector of butterflies, boyfriends and bohemians, not to mention girlfriends, glitz and Galloise, completely uninhibited in the way she chose to live and the way she chose to write. A role model for her re-incarnated self working at The New York Times? Koppel needed to know if Florence Wolfson lived.

To help her story reach climax, she hired a private dick, Charles Eric Gordon. He saw a spread Koppel had written for the NYT about the diary she had found, and volunteered his considerable experience to see if Florence could be found. His hi-tech magnifying-glass-of-choice was his library of pre-computer age phone books. To no one’s surprise except for Lily Koppel and Florence Wolfson, the detective detected a live, working number, for a live, working Florence, in Florida.

Lily had found her new grandmother and best friend. The Red Leather Diary had now become personal, and Lily applied skills and talents not normally associated with dumpster divers to transform the short-hand references in Florence’s diary into a fully fleshed portrait of bohemian New York that has warmth, charm and chutzpah, that not only entertains, but educates.

But what, exactly, did Koppel find so irresistible in that salvaged saunter through the past; evidence that the idealism of youth can mature undaunted with the passage of years? Florence was a social radical at a time when it was a male dominated career choice; a beatnik before there was a beat, a hippy before there was a hip, and a social and sexual outlaw before such crimes were even on the books.

Even today, Florence has a portrait on her wall painted by the mother of Erica Jong. Florence never had fear of flying. In fact, one entry involves her flight of fancy with an Italian playboy, the gigolo pilot of a (no pun intended) bi-plane. He would sleep with male aristocracy by day to finance expensive dinners to romance Florence by night. Sex was not either-or for her, the notion this nation is just now wrestling with after she had it figured out 75 years ago. “In those days, it was fashionable for girls to have relationships. Like Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. What I loved was I didn’t have to worry about dates. The hell with men. It gave me such a sense of freedom. There was a little sex, I have to tell you. … There was a lot of sex, as a matter of fact. I had the breathless experience of acting like a male in the sense that I could dump one and pick up with another.”

Florence developed infatuations, some which culminated with romance, others with frustration. The lesbian stage actresses of the day (1930) were called ‘shadow actors’, the most famous of the era being Eva Le Galliene, who broke Florence’s heart but left her an autographed photo with the words: “The theatre should be an instrument for giving not a machinery for getting.”

Florence not only experimented without inhibition sexually, but with artistic passions as well.

Frequent strolls through the Met intimidated her into thinking that she could not be a visual artist, but she found a perfect way to blend her liberated world view with her considerable literary talents: she became a journalist, authoring opinions for Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping with topics such as “How to quarrel with your husband” and “Don’t apologize so much!” She pre-dated mainstream feminism by a generation or two, but felt no obligation to conform to anyone else’s expectations. She ultimately married a good Jewish dentist, one of the first of her many loves, in spite of the fact that it might have made her mother very proud. It was not capitulation or the end of her societal insurrections – it was a choice made by an empowered woman.

Florence Wolfson, at age 92, apologizes for very little in her long, still going strong life. We are all conformists. Some of us conform to our fears; some of us conform to our desires. Lily Koppel makes it clear that her maverick mentor chose the latter.

Thornton Sully is a reviewer of books and writing coach/editor for both published and developing novelists. He lives in North County.