Jean Kyoung Frazier’s fantastic debut novel Pizza Girl is a moving and messy coming-of-age story full of dark humour. It centres on the narrator who is a pizza delivery girl (unnamed until the end of the book) and she is an eighteen-year-old Korean-American who is unhappy, grieving, and is both apprehensive and uncertain about her pregnancy and the direction her life is taking. She takes a shine to one of her new customers, a middle-aged mother named Jenny, and develops what can only be described as an unhealthy obsession with her.
Pizza Girl lives with her mother who she worries about, and a boyfriend who adores her. They are both excited and looking forward to the arrival of the child, but it seems Pizza Girl does not share this excitement. Instead, she is unhappy and engaging in destructive behaviour that starts to affect the relationships with those around her. I think it is a little unclear why the obsession and desire with Jenny take hold. It could be a means to escape, a crush, a product of anxiety, unresolved issues from her past, or it could be a mix of all of these.
Although it sounds like this book has its share of sadness, the enjoyment is in the writing. Jean Kyoung Frazier goes into detail without becoming boring. The narrator’s view of the world around her, the attention to the little things, the delicate observations she makes all help paint a picture of her world, and in turn her character. It’s not all sadness, but when it is, the reader feels it. The writing is cleverly done that even when Pizza Girl behaves in a way I would not agree with, I still felt sorry for her. As her behaviour and condition sink lower, I felt bad for her and frustrated with her, but I still wanted to protect her and give her a hug.
“I had been thinking constantly about han, a feeling that had been killing generation upon generation of Korean people. According to Mom, han was born in the gut and rose to the chest. … Han was a sickness of the soul, an acceptance of having a life that would be filled with sorrow and resentment and knowing that deep down, despite this acceptance, despite cold and hard facts that proved life was long and full of undeserved miseries, “hope” was still a word that carried warmth and meaning. ”
A big theme that is explored in the book is Pizza Girl’s relationship with her father. He had passed away years previously, but I believe she worries that she will follow in his footsteps. He was an alcoholic who let her mother down. Pizza Girl sneaks out to the same shed her father used to hide away in and she drinks. Sometimes it appears she feels guilty about this, but sometimes it doesn’t. I feel like there is some part of her that is still grieving, some part she can’t share with her mother, and this struggle plus the pregnancy and uncertainty of her future make her turn to alcohol. This type of struggle can’t be solved overnight or over the course of a 200 page book, and to suggest otherwise would be wrong. Perhaps one has to hit rock bottom before they can start to come up?
There is dark humour which stops the story from seeming too miserable. I found Pizza Girl to be crude at times, and she pokes fun at herself. The relationship between Jenny and Pizza Girl could be described as mildly disturbing, but in a comedic sort of way (throwing up in Jenny’s shoes), or to just plain unsettling (lurking outside the house at night) depending on how you look at it. Either way, I couldn’t look away. For me, it was an exploration of someone struggling with their mental health and experiencing a period of great sadness and anxiety, wrapped up in engaging and creative writing, all achieved in a short book. A really remarkable debut.
Pizza Girl is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of September 17th 2020. Content warning: Profanity, Sex, Alcohol.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
In the tradition of audacious and wryly funny novels like The Idiot and Convenience Store Woman comes the wildly original coming-of-age story of a pregnant pizza delivery girl who becomes obsessed with one of her customers.
Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She’s grieving the death of her father (who she has more in common with than she’d like to admit), avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future.
Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled covered pizzas for her son’s happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other towards middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways.
Bold, tender, propulsive, and unexpected in countless ways, Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl is a moving and funny portrait of a flawed, unforgettable young woman as she tries to find her place in the world.
