She drinks nightly, and older sister Rosie warns her against carousing and pregnancy. Nearing 20, Mazie meets two sailors, and has a fling with one while the other watches. After a few years, Mazie works in her brother-in-law Louis's ('the Quiet Giant') candy shop, loathes it, and discovers what becomes a life-long love for the streets and their often destitute denizens. Rebellious and willful, Mazie fights off bullies, plays with young sister Jeanie, and spares no one-including herself-from brutally honest treatment in her journal. For her tenth birthday, Mazie is gifted with a brown leather diary, and slowly begins the secret chronicles of her life. The unlikely new family lives in a small, but mostly happy, apartment. Rosie moves to New York City, and several years later returns with husband Louis to take away her sisters. Horvath, their father, is a violent wife-beater mother Ada cares for her children and is succumbing to abuse. Mazie Phillips and sisters Rosie and Jeanie lead a troubled life in pre-World War One Boston. These entries are accompanied by interviews with people who either knew Mazie, or became fascinated after hearing accounts of her bawdy, spirited life, and of her openhearted support of the Bowery's downtrodden. Despite frequent back-room boozing and romantic flings, Mazie becomes a 'saint' to the suffering locals, chronicling in her secret diary hope, horror, and adventure. Mazie's seeming fearlessness and zest are haunted by childhood abuse, and when the Great Depression surges through the Bowery like a black wave, she welcomes anguished friends and strangers-many homeless-into the Venice Theater's comforting fantasies. A present-day documentarian acquires a 90-year-old diary, and is absorbed by the life of Mazie Phillips-Gordon-Jazz Age party girl, ticket-taker, and champion to addicts and bums on New York City's Lower East Side.

Saint Mazie is a historical novel employing techniques traditional to oral storytelling.

Saint mazie by jami attenberg