Saint Mazie

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. 

I don't know where I saw this book that made me put it on my list, but it was a very good story. Was it really fiction? I felt like it could have been true. I could relate to the character when she was young, but enjoyed her evolution also. Fun quick read.

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recollections from the son of Mazie's lover, the great-grandaughter of the Venice's manager and snippets from Mazie's unpublished autobiography.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