The Red Leather Diary

The title may invoke images of a lovesick teenage girl pouring her heart and soul into a book and may put some readers of because of that. However The Red Leather Diary is an engaging novel that takes you from the present back into an era long ago in the shoes of a young girl who was living ahead of her time. This novel so engrossed me that I was able to read it over the weekend (which as a full-time-stay-at-home-mom is pretty darn good let me tell you) and was fully satisfied when I finished it.

Lily Koppel the author is a reporter for The New York Times and was at the time she found the diary amongst steamer trunks that had been cleared out of a building to make more room for storage space. Interested, she began to read the diary and was taken back into the life of Florence Wolfson, a fourteen year old girl who received the diary on her birthday in 1929 and takes us through the next five years of her life. Amazingly Koppel was able to find Florence after finishing the diary with the help of Charles Eric Gordon, a private investigator who contacted her after reading on of her articles in the Times and returned the diary. It was then that she was able to hear Florence's full story which became the basis for the novel.

Florence is a fourteen year old girl who in addition to being ahead of her time in her ideals was also extremely intelligent, already in high school when she was eleven years old. She loved everything artistic, painting, writing, and reading the classics. Her diary also shows us a woman who was sexually curious which I found most interesting because I was under the impression that in that day and age, things such as same-sex curiosity was kept quiet. Florence was fully honest in her diary about her attraction to both girls and boys; her first girl crush was actress Eva Le Gallienne. Among the people she met in her lifetime were Joy Gresham (maiden name Davidman) who married C.S. Lewish. Their marriage was what the movie Shadowlands was based upon. Florence life is full of adventure and amazing experiences most people don't have in their entire lifetime let alone before they are twenty years old.
Of course cynics will say that this is too much experience and doubt the authenticity of the story. While I do admit that this did cross my mind a couple of times, there is also the idea why lie? It is not like in this day and age where people would like about knowing famous people just to get ahead. But Florence in a nonagenarian; everyone she knew that was famous or became famous is dead she's even out lived her husband, Nat (who is mentioned a few times in the diary). This book is amazing in the fact that Florence was very honest about everything including her love affairs with women and there is no shame there she just thought it was a way of experimenting and living life before settling down in marriage, The one thing that is disappointing about the story is that Florence did just that; she settled. Yes she was famous in literary circuits for awhile, even being published in women's magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan and even wrote a book called Are Husbands Necessary? which wasn't published because it was (you guessed it) ahead of its time. However when reading the diary in the book, Florence wondered what happened to he ambition and her dreams. Koppel is going through this as well, wondering if what she is doing is what she is meant to be doing. A lot of women go through this when they marry wondering if they are just steeling and giving up their dreams. This book will provoke a lot of questions in women's book clubs about society's pressure on women and what they should do with their lives if and when they become wives and mothers.

Whatever the case, this novel is engrossing and a wonderful read. I just fell in love with the world Florence and admired the young woman she was and her drive and her ambition to do the things she did in her youth. To have the experiences she had when she was that young age is admirable enough. Following Florence from fourteen to the eve of her nineteenth birthday, you see Florence through high school, college, a trip abroad on her own right before the outbreak of the WWII and her many pursuits in painting, writing, and music, The Red Leather Diary is a wonderful read that you will not regret picking up.