![]() ![]() Her Big Apple is far less sanitized than today’s, with spiking crime rates and the Subway Vigilante still at large after shooting four black youths who allegedly asked him for $5. It’s New Year’s Eve 1984, and she’s bound for a trek around Manhattan togged out in mink coat and mustard-yellow stockings. ![]() The reader first meets Lillian, however, at age 85. Like Fishback, young Lillian Boxfish heads to Manhattan to forge a self, going on to publish volumes of light verse in addition to establishing a stellar advertising career. ![]() ![]() Rooney touches on these injustices in “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk,” a frequently charming novel inspired by the career of Margaret Fishback, a pioneering and highly successful ad copywriter for Macy’s in the 1920s and 1930s. With expectations of a Pantsuiter-in-Chief, unrivaled policy wonk and master of the shoulder shimmy, we could glance safely back at the bad old days when few women achieved career success and those who did were undercompensated and otherwise horribly treated. Before November, what a different experience it would be reading “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk,” the new novel from poet, essayist and memoirist Kathleen Rooney. ![]()
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