Mabel and Me ― A Novel About the Movies

It's 1912 in Hollywood, the birth of the Movies, and Mabel Normand, the talented prototype of the contemporary comedienne, is shocking the world. Mabel Normand -- the visionary who turned Charlie Chaplin into a movie star, enchanted Mack Sennett, and became the first actress to have her name emblazoned in the title of a motion picture -- is the funniest woman on earth. And she is undoubtedly the most beguiling.Mabel and Me takes us deep inside the earliest days of motion pictures, and together with the Queen of Comedy, we become obsessed with motion pictures, caught in the web of their mesmerizing power. We meet Jack, a young man coming of age with the Movies. And with Mabel. As Jack evolves in a formative Hollywood, he shares his relentless, destructive, and ultimately liberating love for Mabel and the Movies. It's an equilateral triangle whose points teach us not just about the realities and the fiction of film, but about the complex meaning of passion.

Jon Boorstin's first novel, Pay or Play, was called “the definitive send-up for Hollywood” by Publishers Weekly in a coveted starred review. His second, The Newsboys' Lodging-House, won the New York Society Library Award for Historical Fiction. Boorstin has also written the book of film theory, Making Movies Work: Thinking Like a Filmmaker, essential reading at the world's film schools. The work of an Academy AwardR-nominated documentary filmmaker and longtime screenwriter and producer, Mabel and Me is the culmination of Jon Boorstin's lifelong affair with the Movies. He lives in Los Angeles.