![]() ![]() As Billy and her mother shower her with attention and a smothering sense of love, she can only reject it. On the first night she delivers pizza to Jenny’s, she snoops around the house while Jenny is in the other room: “I’d see something new that would wipe the guilt from my thoughts,” Frazier writes, “and leave behind only curiosity, bright and shiny and begging to be stroked.” This curiosity rubs up against the boredom, the constriction she feels in her life. Much of the short, firecracker Pizza Girl is the protagonist’s interiority, which is as complex as it is engrossing. Then she delivers it.įrom here, Frazier’s storytelling prowess only grows more deft. She’s desperate to have him eat, and her voice moves the narrator to go to the store, buy pickles, cut them up, and put them on the pizza herself. Jenny is new in town, and her seven-year-old son Adam won’t eat unless he can have pickle pizza, like he did at their last home in North Dakota. ![]() She is eighteen and pregnant and she sneaks into the shed in the backyard to drink beer at night. ![]() ![]() Pizza Girl lives in Los Angeles with her boyfriend, Billy, and her mother. She doesn’t eat the pizza rather, she makes it, at the desperate request of Jenny Hauser, a single mom and new customer at the pizza parlor where the narrator works as a delivery girl. The unnamed protagonist in Jean Kyoung Frazier’s debut novel, Pizza Girl (Doubleday, 2020), receives an unexpected respite from her grief with a pickle pizza. Pizza Girl is a Tale of Pickle Pizzas, Queerness, and Growing up ![]()
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