Pizza Girl
whose debut novel, Pizza Girl, was published in June by Doubleday.
IT IS startling to come across a familiar voice on the page: not familiar because we’ve heard it before—we absolutely haven’t—but rather because it speaks a narrative we know we will return to, and turn toward, time and time again, for the rest of our lives. Crafting even one of those voices would be a singular achievement, but Jean Kyoung Frazier weaves a chorus from the quotidian to create something new in her novel, Pizza Girl, sculpting characters and a community that we’ll know and love and leave and loathe and forgive and, ultimately, understand. Frazier does this while giving each of her characters humanity and the clarity to act with the benefit of the doubt—the rarest of gestures from a debut author. Frazier lives in Los Angeles, but her work can now live on our bookshelves. In a moment when truly good things can be hard to come by, the publication of this debut novel is all the more fortunate.
Could you talk a bit about the narrator’s inception and any changes that came along when crafting the character across your editing process?
Long story short: I found her voice in my e-mail inbox. It was the fall of 2017, and my girlfriend at the time was threatening to break up with me. She had discovered that I had over 50,000 unread e-mails and thought this spoke volumes about my commitment issues. We were obviously having a bunch of other problems, too, but this felt like one I could actually fix, so, little by little, I started deleting e-mails.
Everything was fine until I got to the 2011 section of my inbox and found messages I’d sent my first love. There were thousands of them. I read every single one, and by the end I just wanted to pop a couple Advil and turn off all the lights in my apartment. I could barely recognize myself in those e-mails.
This can’t be overstated:
I’m very happy I’m not eighteen anymore. But I also have so much love for the me who wrote those e-mails. She was sloppy, reckless, foolish, terrible haircut, really fucking beautiful. The coming-of-age genre is overcrowded for a reason—we’ve all gone through it or will have to.
I’d been toying with the idea of writing a novel about a pizza delivery girl falling into obsession with one of her customers, but it wasn’t until I read those e-mails that I began to actively work on it, that it felt crucial to write about that age before it was too far in my rear-view mirror. It felt important to capture it as honestly as I could, the up and down, the pain and joy. Once I committed to that mindset, the voice came pretty naturally, the unabashed sentimentality of it working well against the novel’s harsh reality—a budding alcoholic, pregnant, eighteenyear-old pizza delivery girl.
Throughout the novel I wondered what you thought Pizza Girl was in conversation with—whether it’s other books, films, music, or moments in your life. The novel seems to refuse to be any one thing in particular, and the amount of technical work to pull that off seems like it was staggering.
It feels like I’m always reading, watching, listening, consuming something, but I wasn’t thinking, at least not consciously, of anything specific while writing. I do remember considering the “slacker” genre as a whole and becoming annoyed at how predominantly male it was, how literary men seemed to hold the monopoly on aimlessly fucking around. To name a few, Weike Wang, Halle Butler, and Ottessa Moshfegh have greatly contributed to the shallow pool of female slacker narratives. I knew I wanted to add a younger millennial one to the mix.
Mostly I thought about what I wished to see more of in literary fiction. Whether
it be sexual fluidity, service-industry jobs, female alcoholism, nontraditional family structures, Americanization, the difficulty of upward assimilation, Los Angeles outside of Hollywood and far from beaches, Tim Duncan, 7-Eleven Slurpees—nothing was off-limits. Maybe that’s why it didn’t feel like any one thing in particular. All I did was write about the things I couldn’t stop thinking about.
I don’t mean to give the impression that writing this novel went smoothly and effortlessly; it for sure didn’t. It’s more like I took a gamble in writing whatever and however I wanted. Though you could say all writing is a little like gambling—shutting your eyes and praying that whoever reads your work cares about what you’re saying. There’s this sort of intrinsic unspoken conversation we enter into with readers each time we put something out there: “This matters to me. I hope it matters to you, too.”
Could you talk a bit about the novel’s structure? Was the final product in line with the forms your initial drafts took? The novel’s narrator seems to be having a conversation with herself throughout the book—negotiating questions that don’t need to be overstated to be understood—and I wondered whether you knew those questions and answers from the outset, or if they changed along the way.
An internal conversation is a good way to put it. Beyond the novel being first-person and voice-driven, I knew from the beginning I wanted it to exist largely in the narrator’s head. I gave her as little dialogue as possible because it was important to me that readers feel the stark difference between her external and internal life. Even with her boyfriend, I didn’t give him much actual dialogue; the majority of what he says is what she imagines he would say.
I also knew early on this would be a short novel. I write short by nature, but particularly with this story and voice, I felt like having it unfold quickly and in a tight space would make the reader feel trapped, suffocated by the narrator’s loneliness, sweating at her breakneck descent into disaster. I liked the idea of being able to read it in one sitting.
So, even when I didn’t know every question and answer, commitment to the form made me feel confident that they’d reveal themselves eventually.
You are good as hell at humor on the page. Can you talk a bit about what makes a joke work for you, and when you know if a bit inside of a scene is working? What do you do with the ones that don’t?
I actually rarely try to write jokes. Or, more accurately, I never start off a project with any pressure on myself to be funny. In my off-the-page life, I’m definitely goofy, at times downright silly. I love a good popsicle stick joke—a knock, knock, who’s there?—but I don’t write to make people laugh. There’s so much I don’t find funny, and I use writing as a way to explore those things.
That being said, some things are just funny. It can’t be helped. I call that “it is what it is” humor. If there’s any type of joke I try to write, it’s that. Here’s an example from my book: “My dad didn’t have any money to leave us. He did have a ’99 Ford Festiva.” It is what it is, and it’s funny, at least to me. That’s the sort of space I like to exist in with comedy. Not calling too much attention, no desperate nudge, nudge, do you get it? It’s the kind of joke that doesn’t require the reader to laugh or to even think it’s funny, since those two lines still serve a purpose in delivering information about the characters. But while it doesn’t matter if no one laughs, it’s nice to hear when people do. A sweet bonus.
It’s a bit of a gauche question, but how does it feel to talk about your book? And what’s your relationship to your work after it is completed? How have you negotiated the rift between what you intended as an author and what is understood, or even expected, by a reader?
I wish I were cool enough to say that
I don’t care about what people think of me or my book, but I do. I really do. Every time I open my mouth to say something about it, I feel the weight of the possibility of sounding like a total idiot. Another uncomfortable truth I’ve had to deal with in the months leading up to my book’s release is how much I enjoy praise and, greater, how much I fear failure.
I remind myself, though, that I always knew this wouldn’t be a book for everyone, particularly moral readers. My editor asked me several times through the revision process if we could cut down the amount the pregnant narrator was drinking, and the answer was always, without hesitation, no. Would it have made my narrator a more likable character to do that? Definitely. Did I care about that? Definitely not.
I wanted to write a novel that took an unflinching look at addiction and how we become the people we are. While I’d like it both ways—to write what’s important to me and to have everyone love me—I know that’s not possible, and ultimately I’m okay with that. Between those two things I’d pick the same one every time.
I knew early on this would be a short novel. I write short by nature, but particularly with this story and voice, I felt like having it unfold quickly and in a tight space would make the reader feel trapped, suffocated by the narrator’s loneliness, sweating at her breakneck descent into disaster.