This article from the New London Day caught my attention, due to I have kept a diary since I was 12 years old, I am now 43 and still have a journal/diary. I have kept all my diaries and admit, I have always thought it would be wonderful to turn them into a book. After reading this article, I know it would be so much harder than I imagine and my life seems somewhat boring compared to this wonderful woman.

Diaries are personal yes, but they also can see you through daily lifes ups/downs and downright strangeness. It is fun to look back and see who you were at that time, and how you have changed or not changed...


'A reporter never knows where a good story will turn up.

Lily Koppel unearthed one in a rather unlikely spot: a Dumpster. The then-22-year-old writer saw one filled with about 50 steamer trunks outside her apartment building on New York's Upper West Side in 2003.

”I'm not the kind of girl who usually Dumpster dives,” she says, but she couldn't resist this collection of things, culled from a dusty basement that the building owners were cleaning out. The trunks were covered with stickers announcing the places they had been: Paris, Monaco. Koppel describes them as treasure chests, and, in a way, they were.

”To me, this just looked like an absolute message in a bottle,” Koppel says in a phone interview. “I had the notion that each box was going to contain many more stories than I would ever be able to tell.”

It turned out to be one story in particular. Among the Bergdorf coats and flapper dresses was a diary written by someone named Florence Wolfson, when she was a teenager from 1929 to 1934 in New York City.

”It was like my story and Florence's crossed,” Koppel says. “Although we were two young women separated by 57 years, I felt so drawn to her, her search for love and meaning in her life. ... (The diary) was like the


best novel I had ever read. But it was all true.”

Koppel had moved from Chicago to New York City, where she was working as a metro and celebrity reporter at The New York Times. She wanted her life to be like “Breakfast at Tiffany's.”

She saw a semblance of that kind of life in Wolfson's diary. Wolfson wrote every day about her life: going to the El Morocco nightclub, meeting friends for tea at Schrafft's, starting a literary salon in her parents' apartment. She travelled, by herself at age 21, to Europe, where a member of the British Parliament took her to tea. She wrote in the diary about losing her virginity and about her romantic relationships with men and women.

Koppel says that Wolfson, who was a writer and a painter, created diary entries that were each “like a little piece of poetry.”

Through a private investigator, Koppel tracked down Wolfson.

”It was a surprise, to say the least” when Koppel contacted her about the diary, Wolfson says in a phone interview. Reading the entries, she recalls thinking, “Is that me? Was that me? Things change, but I kind of enjoyed it as I read it over because I had a lot of wonderful experiences in those days that are not available really now because New York isn't what it was. It was a town you could roam in. You could skate in Central Park. Nobody molested you.”

Koppel ended up writing an article and then a book about the diary and her experience meeting Wolfson. She will speak about her book, “The Red Leather Diary,” Monday at Waterford Community Center.

Wolfson, who divides her time between Westport and Florida, won't be there - “I am 92, almost 93. There's a limit to how much I can gadabout.”

The diary does contain some very personal information about her early life, but Wolfson says, “I did not really blush. I kind of admired my willingness to pursue what I wanted. ... I'm far removed in reality, but mentally I certainly empathized with what I used to be.

”I know it's a little off the mainstream, but (there was) nothing that I feel was anything but wonderful experiences. I had no negative thoughts, and neither do my daughter or granddaughters.”

When Koppel came calling, Wolfson says her life was rather dull. Koppel recalls Wolfson's saying to her, “How did I end up living this ordinary life?”

Wolfson wed - her husband died in 2007, after 67 years of marriage - and settled down, raising two daughters. She wanted the normalcy of family life and to be financially secure, Koppel says.

Now, though, she is gaining some fame and plenty of attention, even appearing with Koppel on the “Today” show.

Wolfson says, “This is the kind of thing my younger self would have said, 'OK, go ahead and do it.' “



Who: Author Lily Koppel

When: 7-9 p.m. Monday

Where: Waterford Public Library, 49 Rope Ferry Road, Waterford

Admission: Free

Call: 444-5805

'Dear Diary ...'A tossed-out journal sends author on an adventure of a lifetime