blue merrick

PIZZA GIRL

I’ve lived in New York City since I was eighteen years old, and in the three years since then, I have lived within walking distance of Strand—one of NYC’s most famous bookstores. Being a compulsive book-hoarder, you’d think I’d be there every other day, perusing its enormous selection. But I have a confession: it wasn’t until October of this year that I ventured inside for the first time. I didn’t plan it, either; my visit was on a whim, a last-minute decision to cross the street and go inside after visiting a comic book store with a friend.

I wandered the aisles, and it was at a table labeled “LGBTQ+” that my attention was captured by a small paperback with a bright neon cover that appeared to display… a piece of pizza. Not only a piece of pizza, but one covered in bright green pickles. Intrigued, I picked it up, and that was how I found myself in possession of Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl.

Now, I consider it cosmic intervention—it would be a dramatic understatement to say that Frazier’s debut novel did not disappoint. I could say all the things they teach you to say in. school about a book that you like: irreverent, witty prose, three-dimensional characters, an uncomplicated yet challenging plot. But the truth about Pizza Girl is that it cut through to my soul in a way I both was unprepared for and, as I realized later, needed.

Pizza Girl tells the tale of an eighteen-year-old Korean American protagonist, pregnant by her boyfriend and working as a pizza delivery woman in the suburbs of Los Angeles. One day she gets a call from a desperate woman who asks her for one thing: a large pepperoni pizza with pickles. Her son won’t eat anything else, she says, and the protagonist’s store is the fifth one she’s called. Our protagonist goes to the supermarket to get pickles herself, puts them on a pizza, and drives to the customer’s house. This is where she first meets Jenny Hauser, and from first sight it’s not quite love, but something else. It becomes a routine: pizza with pickles.

Smothered by her loving boyfriend and mother, mourning the death of her father, and clueless about the future that lies ahead of her, the protagonist quickly becomes obsessed with Jenny in a way that confuses her. Here is where Pizza Girl deeply moved me: in Frazier’s depiction of a burgeoning and mystifying sexuality, a love by one woman for another. “How do you know?” The protagonist asks her friend, on the topic of him being gay. “I don’t know,” he replies. “Nature, nurture, who the fuck knows. The outcome is the same.”

Pizza Girl is no idealistic love story, and that’s what makes it so utterly genuine—that’s what’s imprinted it into my soul, as a young woman who has had many Jennys. Few people can speak with such an aching authenticity about what it’s like to be a woman who loves other women. Pizza Girl is not a love story—but it’s what I needed.

Blue Merrick is Fiction Editor of the tiny journal.