Saint Mazie
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.
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Inspired by a 1940 profile by Joseph Mitchell in the New Yorker, Saint Mazie was a real life Queen of the Bowery. Working the ticket counter at a tiny theatre in New York from 8am to midnight, Mazie would then walk the streets alone and hand out money and soap to the homeless she encountered. She'd drag others to flophouses and called more ambulances than any other private citizen in New York at that time. It was someone author Jami Attenberg felt deserved her own story.
The book's fictional documentarian pieces together excerpts from Mazie's diary and intersperses it with recollections from the son of Mazie's lover, the great-grandaughter of the Venice's manager and snippets from Mazie's unpublished autobiography. It allows Mazie's brash, booze soaked, cigarette smoking rasp to come through as her story winds through Prohibition, the Wall Street bombing and the Great Depression. It's a story of New York in the early part of the 1900's.
After reading Joseph Mitchell's piece on Mazie for The New Yorker, I was dying to get to know her better. This is, of course, a fictional account of her life and likely quite far from her reality, but I enjoyed it as a tribute nonetheless. Jami Attenberg's version of Mazie sparkles with life. As she struggles to find her place in this world, she is always thinking of those around her. I wanted the world for her. I especially loved the way her deep relationship with Sister Tee was written. It felt shockingly real and was so affecting. The way this book is structured makes it an easy page-turner. Mazie's diary entries are interspersed with the thoughts of people who knew her or knew of her in some capacity. It's a fast-paced but thoughtful read, and I loved it.
