Saint Mazie

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recollections from the son of Mazie's lover, the great-grandaughter of the Venice's manager and snippets from Mazie's unpublished autobiography.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.