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Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg

Historical fiction

Saint Mazie

by Jami Attenberg

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Quick take

Live a little longer in the world of Mazie Phillips, the proprietor of New York's Venice movie theater, where ‘everyone's welcome… even the snobs.’

Why I love it

Be prepared to live in the past, to be immersed in the gritty, grimy, pulsating New York of the early twentieth century, for as long as it takes you to read this astonishing, delightful and heartbreaking new novel by Jami Attenberg. You'll read it quickly, but upon finishing, you'll wish that you'd read it more slowly, if only to live a little longer in the world of Mazie Phillips, the proprietor of New York's Venice movie theater, where "everyone's welcome… even the snobs." Mazie, a real person made famous by Joseph Mitchell's 1940 profile in The New Yorker, presided over the Lower East Side movie house — she was colorful, generous, and as much a fixture in her neighborhood as the theater she ran.

Coming of age in the Roaring Twenties, Mazie's adventures as a single woman in underground New York — her dance hall escapades and Prohibition-defying love of speakeasies — make her the kind of character that stands out among so many Jazz Age personalities.

Opening the theater to down-on-their luck men from the neighborhood as the Depression takes hold, she becomes the matriarch of a different kind of family, one whose disparate members Attenberg depicts with nuanced eccentricity. "I couldn't ignore them," Mazie says to Joseph Mitchell when he proposes writing her story. "I'm not so interesting. It's the bums that have the real story." He tells her, "No, the bums are interesting because of you."

Though based on a real woman, Saint Mazie is an imagined history compiled almost entirely through fictional documents. The book switches between entries from her "unpublished autobiography" and entries from her diary spanning from 1907–1939, which has been "discovered" decades later. That these made-up sources feel authentic and cohesive is a testament of the author's superior talent.

Through this unusual structure, Attenberg deploys a chorus of voices that together create an oral history of those who knew Mazie best, each of whom helps to bring her to life. The Red Hook man who finds Mazie's diary in a box near the Brooklyn Navy Yard is in awe of the Mazie he meets there: "I just heard her in my head so clearly and thought I know her… And I knew the quality of her character, which made me think I could spend the rest of my life with her." This is just how I felt reading Saint Mazie. The one happy weekend it took me to finish the book was not nearly enough.

Member ratings (59)

Historical fiction
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Historical fiction
View all
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
The Women
The Lion Women of Tehran
Husbands & Lovers
Shelterwood
A Thousand Times Before
All We Were Promised
Spitting Gold
The Seventh Veil of Salome
The Mayor of Maxwell Street
The Great Divide
The Storm We Made
The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard
Lessons in Chemistry
The Frozen River
What We Kept to Ourselves
Take My Hand
The Last Russian Doll
The First Ladies
The House Is On Fire
River Sing Me Home
The Attic Child
Malibu Rising
The Book of Longings
Hester
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev
The Nightingale
Daisy Jones & The Six
The Lincoln Highway
The Secret Book of Flora Lea
Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?
The Circus Train
Peach Blossom Spring
Hang the Moon
Booth
The Good Left Undone
The Perishing
The Family
Things We Lost to the Water
The Spectacular
Still Life
Send for Me
The Magnolia Palace
The Bookbinder
China Room
This Tender Land
Atomic Love
All the Light We Cannot See
The Vanishing Half
Outlawed
The Four Winds
Independence
The Fountains of Silence
Libertie
Queen of Thieves
The Great Believers
The Clockmaker's Daughter
A Gentleman in Moscow
The Great Alone
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
The Heart’s Invisible Furies
Rules of Civility
Circling the Sun
The Moor's Account
Jacqueline in Paris
Don't Cry for Me
The Christie Affair
Bloomsbury Girls
The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle
Bronze Drum