An Ode to the Female Slacker with Jean Kyoung Frazier

At the Rumpus, Jean Kyoung Frazier discusses her novel, Pizza Girl, which centers around a pregnant pizza delivery girl who redefines the genre of slacker fiction. “I think when people shit on characters like [slackers] it’s because they don’t want to be reminded of those questions,” she says, “or that there’s something about watching a lost, fuck-up character who makes them uncomfortable, reminds them of the ugliness, the difficulty of life. If that character is also woman, well, there are going to be even more issues since beauty and perfection are so inherent to how we view and judge women. It feels really important to, even if it’s difficult, talk about characters that don’t live up to societal expectations, because ultimately, the way you make people feel ugly is by not having nuanced and widespread portraits of them in popular, mainstream media.”