Jean Kyoung Frazier Thinks Fiction Should Have More Hot Cheetos
In Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier’s explosive debut novel, everything changes on a Wednesday afternoon at 4:30 p.m. Our nameless narrator is eighteen, pregnant, and feeling adrift as she stumbles through her days as a Los Angeles pizza delivery driver, all the while grieving the death of her alcoholic father and avoiding the smothering ministrations of her loving mother and boyfriend. When a suburban housewife named Jenny Hauser calls in with a peculiar order for a pepperoni and pickle pizza, Pizza Girl’s collision with Jenny sends her tailspinning into a psychosexual obsession with dangerous consequences.
In just 193 wry, propulsive pages, Pizza Girl hurtles through the dark waters of obsession and addiction, as our dysfunctional Pizza Girl downs Miller Lites while studiously avoiding any semblance of forward motion. Yet at the same time, the novel bristles with biting wit and optimism, each page a feast of Cheeto-fingered heart, humor, and lyricism. Esquire spoke with Frazier about what she learned during her own wayward summer delivering pizzas, as well as the complexity of grief and the irresistibility of voyeurism.
Esquire: Where did this novel begin for you?
Jean Kyoung Frazier: It sounds so goofy, but I found the voice of this pizza girl in my email inbox. I was dating someone at the time who thought it was insane that I had about 50,000 unread emails in my inbox, so one day I went through and started deleting. I found emails from back in 2009 that I had sent to the first love of my life. Those emails were just so painful to read. They were beautiful. They were long and flowery, and I didn't even recognize the person that had written them. I wasn't that person anymore, and there's something really tragic about that. At the time, I'd been thinking of doing a pizza delivery novel, and then I realized, “This is the voice. This is how I write this character.” In some ways, the novel is a love letter to my eighteen-year-old self.
ESQ: Tell me about the summer when you yourself delivered pizzas. What was that time of your life like?
JKF: I was twenty years old, and it was a really interesting summer of my life. I wasn't pregnant or becoming obsessed with a woman twice my age, but I was definitely feeling a little lost and adrift. I was working three jobs at the time, and I picked up the pizza job because I could do it late at night. It sounded like an easy way to make a little bit of extra money. I didn't think about the job in the moment as much as I did after the fact. As time passed, I began to think about how it was such an interesting way to glimpse into people's lives. It's almost cinematic, the way a door opens and you get a snapshot into a person's life. It’s impossible not to make judgements. That’s the nature of being alive—we’re constantly judging.
ESQ: I love how this novel wrestles with that idea of voyeurism as seen through a stranger's front door. Take Jenny's home, for example, where the foyer is pristine, but the living room behind it is a mess. What does that vantage point reveal or obscure about a person?
JKF: It’s a good question. If Pizza Girl had just stood in the doorway, she would have only seen that beautiful exterior, but because she took a few steps inward, she was able to see a little bit more under the surface. Back when I was in grad school, I was bartending a lot, so I was working night shifts. I'd get back to my apartment at 5:00 AM and wake up right before my first class. I didn’t have a chance to shower, so I’d throw on a cap and go to class. I remember at the end of the first semester, we had a Secret Santa, and a girl in my class gave me a ball cap. She said, “Because you're a hat girl. You love hats.” I said, “I don't know if that's true about me.” She said, “But you're always wearing a hat.” I guess to her, I was, but in general, I don't really wear hats. It was a funny example of the impressions people gain of you from what you show them.
ESQ: Pizza Girl really needs to believe in those impressions. We see this when she’s devastated to learn that some of her regulars, Rita and Louie, aren’t as happy as she thinks they are. How important are the narratives we tell ourselves about other people?
JKF: That’s the sad thing—in moments like that, when you get a deeper glimpse of people's lives, you realize how much we actually don't really care to know people. Not even how difficult it is to know people, but how we want that easy-to-swallow idea of someone. That realization was so devastating to Pizza Girl because she really needed to believe that this couple was the perfect couple. They were her example of what a relationship can look like in your late thirties, and to have that perfect image broken was devastating.
ESQ: At only 193 pages, this novel can be consumed in one sitting. Is that intentional?
JKF: That’s how I intended it to be read. I think there are certain books that are really fun because of their length—you can just blow through them, which adds to the experience. Some people like to read in little chunks, especially if the subject matter is overwhelming. It’s a dark book, so I do understand the need to perhaps take breaks, but if you really want to have the full whirlwind of this character's experience, one sitting is a great way to read it.
ESQ: One of the great strengths of this novel is the complexity to Pizza Girl’s grief for her father. She wrestles with how to grieve a person who constantly disappointed her. How did you inhabit the complexity of that grief and refuse to romanticize it?
JKF: It's definitely difficult. I know there are plenty of evil people out in the world, but sometimes it's almost more tragic having someone in your life that you can't easily hate. They haven't done any one thing to make you cast them off, but they’ve done a bunch of little, painful things to you over a period of time. How can you weigh that against the love you have for them and the joys you’ve had with them? How can one person be all those things to you? It's overwhelming, and it's even more overwhelming when you can't talk it out with them anymore. They're just gone from your life.
ESQ: This novel is full of food, but not just any food—cheap, easy, “good for the soul” food. Pizza, tacos, Hot Cheetos, patty melts, etc. What did you hope for all of that sensory information to bring to the book?
JKF: This book is so much about obsession and consumption, as well as the things we use to fill our time. Food can be that for people. In quarantine, I feel like I want to be eating constantly. There’s something about food that provides comfort. Also: do you ever read books and they mention all these fancy foods, and you’re like, “What the hell is that? I've never seen anyone eat that.” I wanted to have very recognizable foods—comforting food, familiar food. There need to be more Hot Cheetos in fiction.
ESQ: One of the most memorable images in this book is Jenny’s ponytail. What an incredible image that is, full of meaning and desire and symbolism. Not just symbolism in our narrator's life, but in our cultural imagination. Where did that image start for you, and how did it build over the course of writing this book?
JKF: At first, I was thinking about typical hairstyles for mothers. Like you say, there's symbolism to ponytails— they're viewed as very useful. The way a ponytail hangs down someone's back, free-flowing and with a bounce when someone walks or runs… it seemed like the kind of thing an obsessive eighteen-year-old girl would fixate on. It’s so representative of the youth that she's afraid of losing, and that’s a big reason why Jenny is so appealing to her. Jenny is 38, but she still seems to have this energy that Pizza Girl recognizes in herself.
ESQ: As I think about this book in the broader scope of what's happening in literature, I think that Pizza Girl joins this great tradition of female slackers from writers like Halle Butler and Otessa Moshfegh. How important was it to you that she be a bit lost and a bit frustrating to the reader?
JKF: It just felt honest to me. At that age, you're still becoming a person, and that's so much of what this book is about. How do we become the people we become? Throughout the editing process, my editor asked me several times, “Do you think that we should be having this pregnant narrator drink this much? It's uncomfortable to watch.” The thing is, it should be uncomfortable. She is a deeply troubled young woman who's only a woman by the fact of her years. She doesn't yet understand the gravity of her responsibilities and is running away from reality.
I totally understand if the drinking means it’s too much for people to read and they have to put it down. I would never knock anyone for what they need to feel comfortable in what they want to read. I wanted to write this story because this addiction is something that affects everyone, and becoming pregnant doesn't transform you into a good person. How does someone become a mom? I don't think it necessarily happens when you become pregnant, and I don't think it happens even when you give birth to the child. You might be a mother, but to become a mom and to transform into a person that is capable of taking care of a child… that’s easier for some, and not so easy for others.
ESQ: This is just your first novel. What’s next for you?
JKF: I'm mostly just excited that I’m still writing. Sometimes you worry, “Is this all I’ve got in the tank? This was so hard—can I do it again?” I’m working on two things right now. I’m working on my basketball novel, which is about virginity, and it's going to be a good time. I’m also working on a stoner tragedy, which is the most fun I’ve had writing in awhile. I'm working on this stoner story a little bit more than the basketball story, because the basketball novel is about high school-age kids again. I feel like I just wrote about an eighteen-year-old, but the stoner tragedy is about people in their mid-to-late twenties. It’s freeing to write from a different point of view and a different place in life.
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