NONFICTION

Five years ago, Lily Koppel stumbled onto a writer's dream story.

As she walked out of her Upper West Side apartment building, the 22-year-old New York Times reporter noticed a Dumpster filled with old steamer trunks.

You know: the kind that used to accompany travelers on long sea journeys and return covered with labels from far-flung places such as Hong Kong, Paris and Monaco.

Curious, Koppel climbed inside the Dumpster and began exploring. She found a treasure trove of objects from a previous age: a kimono, a beaded flapper dress, a riding jacket and champagne glasses.

Koppel arranged for a Times photographer to take pictures of the trunks. By nightfall, the Dumpster had attracted vans of people foraging for flea-market items.

As Koppel rode the elevator back up to her apartment, a doorman mentioned that he had retrieved a diary from the Dumpster. Would she like to see it?

The diary had belonged to a teenage girl named Florence Wolfson, who used it to record the intimate details of her life from 1929 (when she turned 14) to 1934.

It was a tumultuous time, segueing from the Jazz Age to the Great Depression, and it was a perfect vehicle for an article. Koppel's story about the red leather diary ran in The New York Times two years ago.

Now, she has expanded her account into a full-fledged biography called "The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal."

It's mesmerizing.

Koppel evokes 1930s Manhattan nicely, but it's Wolfson herself who makes the book remarkable. For readers whose experience of the Deco era is limited to movies starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the story of the free-spirited Wolfson may read like a trial run for the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Among her notable lovers are a darkly handsome Italian count and an intoxicating woman Wolfson calls M.

If rescuing the 74-year-old diary from the landfill was an unlikely achievement, finding its owner would seem to require luck of another magnitude.

Koppel, it seems, is awfully lucky.

With the help of a private investigator, she managed to find Wolfson in Connecticut, where she was living with her 95-year-old husband, a retired oral surgeon. And yes, the husband shows up in the diary.

Wolfson, it turns out, is a master of understatement.

"Life offered me opportunities that I don't think a lot of girls get," she tells Koppel when they finally meet. "I think about it -- it was quite a life."
Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at www.thewag.net.