New York is a city of transplants, immigrants and Americans alike, who arrive with hopes of fame and success. Once cleaved from the connective tissue of family heritage, however, these transplants are forced to fabricate histories. It is this need to root oneself that drives Chicago-born, New York-based writer Lily Koppel's The Red Leather Diary. This decade-spanning tale of memory and identity chronicles Koppel's discovery of a 75-year-old diary and the relationship she develops with the diarist, the now 90-year-old Florence Wolfson, who Koppel adopts as her New York grandmother.

The account begins on Wolfson's 14th birthday, in 1929, and ends five years later, on her 19th birthday. Every day for those intervening years, Wolfson recorded her hopes, dreams, travails, and escapades in lilting poetic vignettes heavily peppered with ellipses. As the daughter of Jewish immigrants raised on the Upper East Side, her story has all the makings of a Fitzgeraldian saga: upper-class ennui, tumultuous rendezvous, literary salons, and death. Wolfson is a young woman in love with everything that New York of the '30s had to offer; she spends her days watching Eva Le Gallienne star in Hedda Gabler, her evenings cavorting with friends, and her nights living out her fantasies on her Remington typewriter.

Though the memoir falls victim to a nostalgic image of a Depression-era New York that has only ever existed in artistic retellings, the narrative is grounded by the story of Koppel, a frustrated and lonely young woman who turns to the diary for solace. In a noir-inspired move, Koppel hires a private detective who helps her track down Wolfson, who is by then a great-grandmother living in Connecticut. As Wolfson fills Koppel in on everything that happened after her last entry on August 10, 1934, we learn that her youthful creativity gave way to adult normalcy. Everything, it seems, gives way to the erosive passage of time — everything except that which is written.

-Adda Birnir