Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg

Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg- 336 pages

Book Blurb:

Meet Mazie Phillips: big-hearted and bawdy, she’s the truth-telling proprietress of The Venice, the famed New York City movie theater. It’s the Jazz Age, with romance and booze aplenty–even when Prohibition kicks in–and Mazie never turns down a night on the town. But her high spirits mask a childhood rooted in poverty, and her diary, always close at hand, holds her dearest secrets.
When the Great Depression hits, Mazie’s life is on the brink of transformation. Addicts and bums roam the Bowery; homelessness is rampant. If Mazie won’t help them, then who? When she opens the doors of The Venice to those in need, this ticket-taking, fun-time girl becomes the beating heart of the Lower East Side, and in defining one neighborhood helps define the city.

Then, more than ninety years after Mazie began her diary, it’s discovered by a documentarian in search of a good story. Who was Mazie Phillips, really? A chorus of voices from the past and present fill in some of the mysterious blanks of her adventurous life.

My Review: 4 stars

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Saint Mazie is a gem of a person and the book, a wonderful read. Attenberg uses the 1940 article entitled Mazie in The New Yorker magazine by Joseph Mitchell, as a springboard to share the fictionalized diary of Mazie Phillips Gordon

Through the diary of Mazie and other interviews, we meet a strong willed, hard as rocks, soft as pudding, contradiction of a woman. Her heart is so big, it bleeds off the page and you just want to jump in the book and give her a hug.

I love revisionist fiction and this story of Mazie and the bums she helps, the nun she cherishes, the men she loves, the sisters she comforts and the burdens she bears, all make her a likeable character. This would be a great book club discussion as I’m sure there’s lots of information you can gather on the real Mazie.

Quotes I liked:

I let the sun hit me. The sun’s some kind of gift. Another day we’re all alive. I wish she could understand. I’m just happy to be alive.”

-“ I won’t talk about what happened though, what I saw there. You know, we’re not like your generation where we need to talk about everything little thing. Sometimes a bad thing happens and when then you’re done with it.”

-“A sister knows the difference between a gift and a favor.”

-“I was nineteen years old—that’s a good age to blame the wrong people for your problems.”