"In my reckless and undiscouraged youth," Lillian Boxfish writes, "I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street ... "She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R. H. Macy's to become the highest-paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, "in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it."Now it's the last night of 1984 and Lillian, eighty-five years old but just as sharp and savvy as ever, is on her way to a party. It's chilly enough out for her mink coat, and Manhattan is grittier now--her son keeps warning her about a subway vigilante on the prowl--but the quick-tongued poetess has never been one to scare easily. On a walk that takes her over ten miles around the city, she meets bartenders, bodega clerks, security guards, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be, while reviewing a life of excitement and adversity, passion, and heartbreak, illuminating all the ways New York has changed--and has not.A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.Lillian figures she might as well take her time. For now, after all, the night is still young.