Jami Attenberg's other works include the story collection Instant Love and the novels The Kept Man, The Melting Season and The Middlesteins.įraming the diary itself are the spoken testimonies of neighbors and friends, mostly ordinary folks, who speak out now and then about their relationship to Mazie and the effect she had on them. As he reads his way through the diary, he falls in love with Mazie.
One morning on his way to work, Sorenson finds the pages in a box of paper trash someone has put on the curb. We owe our discovery of Mazie's jottings - or so goes the novel's premise - to a shop owner named Pete Sorenson, from Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood. And build she did, inventing for Mazie a lifelong diary that begins when she is 10 years old and continues into her early 40s, the final few years of a life in which she surrounded herself with the city's working classes and Bowery down-and-outers.Īttenberg makes the episodic diary entries the heart of the novel, entries that are usually relatively brief and run from expressions of early joy and observations of family woes to love, both spiritual and carnal, and the nature and effect of hard work. Attenberg encountered that essay in a collection of Mitchell's magazine pieces, and she apparently felt such an affinity with the real-life Mazie that she decided to create a larger than life fictional version, around whom she would build a novel. In December of 1940, Joseph Mitchell wrote a 10-page profile of her in The New Yorker. An attractive girl with a robust sense of life, Mazie grew up to become an exemplary ordinary citizen with a soul of gold, a charitable heart and abundant desires.Īnd a great subject for writers who love New York. Though born in Boston just at the end of the 19th century, she moved to New York City at the age of 10 to live with her sister Rosie. The Mazie of Jami Attenberg's new novel is Mazie Phillips Gordon - an actual New Yorker.
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