Zillah’s twenty-three and stuck. She’s stuck living with her quirky mother, stuck with a diet of ten toddler-approved foods, and stuck in a relationship with a man who thinks sharks are immortal. Zillah desperately wants to move out on her own, but first she needs to prove she’s brave enough and that her mom won’t self-destruct. Things change when she secretly listens to her neighbor’s exposure therapy and decides to DIY her own mental health. But her first therapy experiment accidentally injures her mom, and life gets even stranger when she befriends the neighbor she’s been spying on.
Zillah gets to see the power of leaning into fear up close. But she also topples her carefully constructed home life, questions the “facts” of her childhood, and risks her mother’s stability as long-buried truths start to unravel. Zillah must decide who she wants to be and what she’s willing to leave behind.
Tender, funny, and full of nervy optimism, PICKY celebrates the courage it takes to reject the meal you were handed and instead choose from the buffet.
Zillah’s twenty-three and stuck. She’s stuck living with her quirky mother, stuck with a diet of ten toddler-approved foods, and stuck in a relationship with a man who thinks sharks are immortal. Zillah desperately wants to move out on her own, but first she needs to prove she’s brave enough and that her mom won’t self-destruct. Things change when she secretly listens to her neighbor’s exposure therapy and decides to DIY her own mental health. But her first therapy experiment accidentally injures her mom, and life gets even stranger when she befriends the neighbor she’s been spying on.
Zillah gets to see the power of leaning into fear up close. But she also topples her carefully constructed home life, questions the “facts” of her childhood, and risks her mother’s stability as long-buried truths start to unravel. Zillah must decide who she wants to be and what she’s willing to leave behind.
Tender, funny, and full of nervy optimism, PICKY celebrates the courage it takes to reject the meal you were handed and instead choose from the buffet.
There’s a one-in-ten chance Cheerios will be my last meal. This is my deep thought while I spoon dry cereal into my mouth and choke for a second. I recover and knock on a wood cabinet for luck. I can’t die at age twenty-three full of toddler kibble. I’d rather exit life with one of my more mature options.
A habit I need to break is going without a spoon entirely and using my tongue to trap and pull up cereal like a frog catching flies. Efficient and mess-free, but a higher choking risk. When I’m eating that way, I keep a spoon on hand, just in case Paula catches me.
I call her “Mom” to her face because she’s my mom, but I like to think of her as “Paula my roommate” to feel more like other adults in their twenties. Within the year, I’ll have my first real-live roommate, my boyfriend, Cliff. Paula’s holding my move-out money for me, and she promises to fork over the dough once I’m ready.
But her definition of “ready” keeps changing.
After the cereal takes the edge off my hunger, I preheat the oven for our usual Thursday dinner of tater tots and chicken strips. My many years of practice with reconstituted potatoes and frozen chicken has taught me that 385-degrees Fahrenheit is the magic temperature that works for both tots and strips without leaving too much raw or burnt.
Paula gets home from the family medicine clinic she manages and talks to me loudly from the entryway while she changes out of work shoes, into home shoes, and sanitizes her hands.
“Anyway, did you see the news today? About that girl in Indiana?” she asks, as though we’re in the middle of a conversation. She makes her way to the kitchen and continues. “Or Iowa. It was one of the I states. Did you see that one?”
“No,” I say and wonder what’s next. Knowing Paula, this won’t be a happy story about someone winning the lottery twice in one week.
She kisses me on the cheek and washes up while I slide the baking trays into the oven. Paula’s animated while she tells me about the woman’s abduction and murder. She closes with, “Can you imagine?”
I can.
My imagination is way too good for these stories. I easily picture myself in that unfortunate young woman’s situation. Helpless. Hungry. Hurt.
My fear rises like bile in my throat, and I picture it as a crayon doodle. Brown and red and lime green all battle inside me like a poorly drawn map of the nervous system.
It’s an old habit from when I’d share my worries with Paula as a kid. I wasn’t good at describing emotions, but I could tell her when I felt scribbly inside like pencil scratches or calm like watercolor.
“But I have a strategy,” Paula says brightly.
“For what?”
“Abduction. To prevent it.”
Whatever idea she has is going to suck ass. But my imaginary doodle gets smoother and less clashy. It’s comforting to have another person to plan things out with.
“Want to tell me at dinner?” I ask as I put away the cereal and sponge off the counter.
“Let’s talk now.” She sits at the dining room table and asks, “Tater tots or fries?”
“Tots.”
She sighs, even though we haven’t had tots since Monday. She knows there’s only so many ways to make my dietary habits interesting. I feel guilty enough about the weirdness without any accusatory exhalations. Zillah, I say to myself, moms are allowed to sigh.
My nutritionist Eleanor will sigh some four-letter words when I add processed potatoes to my food tracker. She’s Cliff’s cousin, and he bribed me with Pentel Graph Gear Pencils to work with her. “Try it for a while. Just once a month,” he’d said. “You don’t have to eat anything you don’t want to eat.” I’ve only met her once so far, and her comment (“Ten foods? I can’t tell if you’re joking.”) is still ringing in my ears.
“I’ll take any tots that come out half-crunchy,” I say.
“But back to abduction—”
“Increasing it or preventing it?”
She ignores my sass and makes her pitch. “Using the computer website to see where you are isn’t good enough. Your phone could be at school, but your body could be anywhere. So, we’ll take pictures of the car any time we park. Not just the car. A selfie picture of you or of me in front of the car.”
“‘Selfie picture’ is redundant.”
“Don’t get smart. We’ll send the pictures to each other by text message. If we don’t hear from each other, or if the Find my iPhone program isn’t working, then just think how good this will be to help the investigation.”
“Investigation?”
“Whe— if one of us is abducted.” She gets up and continues the pitch while she gets out things to set the table. “Of course, you have nothing to worry about. It’s much more likely we will get in a car accident or lost or maybe in a what-do-you-call-it. Tsunami? What’s a big watery mess in Chicago called?”
“I don’t think we have those here.” I imagine a post-apocalyptic wave off Lake Michigan that sweeps up the Magnificent Mile.
“Then a tornado.”
“Is there a different way we could check on each other?”
“No, no, no,” she sings. “This is what the experts recommend.” She opens the oven to investigate dinner status. “Consider how reassuring it will be. I’ll send you mine, too.”
I think about the selfies while Paula complains about the quality of the in-progress tater tots and chicken strips (“Are these the garbagy generic ones? Too salty. I like the name-brand ones better. I don’t believe that nonsense about them being the same product with a different label. What do you think of that one?”).
I do worry about her.
A lot.
If she’s home fifteen minutes late or if her phone doesn’t connect to our family location-tracking app, I assume she’s dead or at least mangled and in the process of dying.
She has the same, if not worse, worries about me and I’d like to spare her some of the hours of anxiety she spends on me each week. I usually keep her posted, but sometimes I get wrapped up in things with Cliff.
I’ll be moving in with Cliff in a few months, if I get my real estate internship. Paula has promised that once I get a placement, I can have the five thousand dollars my dad gave her when I turned eighteen. He meant for it to help me move out, but I doubt he expected it to take me this long. Paula’s also going to give me a raise for the part-time admin work I do for the clinic she manages. That, plus occasional babysitting and maybe student loans, will be enough to pay rent once we get a place. But she holds the keys to the money from Dad I’m planning to use to pay the deposit, first month’s rent, and last month’s rent that all these Chicago slumlords demand.
Cliff works as IT support for University of Illinois at Chicago, convenient since I go to UIC and we can go to campus together when I spend the night. It pays okay and he’s got rich parents to fall back on. He’s been willing to pay more than his half so I can get out sooner, but I don’t want to be a freeloader. Plus, I know myself — I’d turn into the housecleaner to feel like I’m earning my keep. I want to enter the next phase of our life together on even ground.
I can stand this for now, knowing it’s temporary. Paula’s safety measures are annoying, but they come from a good place. And they soothe my fears, too.
“Yeah, let’s try it for a few weeks.” As soon as I agree, I feel a visceral relief. I hate how good it feels to have a safety plan.
And I ignore the little voice saying that other twenty-three-year-olds don’t need to know where their mommy is every second of the day.
After dinner, I sit at my desk and organize my study-music playlist.
Paula opens my door without knocking and walks in while sorting a small pile of mail.
“Zillah, you have a few things, but it’s all junk.” I reach out to take it, and she lifts it over my head, out of my reach. “Did you finish your internship cover letter yet?”
“I’m working on it,” I lie. “Are you withholding mail as punishment? That’s a federal offense.”
“No, my doll.” She hands me the small stack. “Just want to see if you could reach.”
Despite seeing me every day, Paula always seems amused by my growth plateau at a smidge over five feet as a teenager. Now, at twenty-three, there’s no hope for a late adolescent growth spurt. At least being the shortest makes me easy to remember at such a large university.
Being tiny also helps me look young, which is nice since I’m usually the oldest in my classes. My friends from high school and freshman year have almost all graduated, but I’ll still be chugging along for at least another two years to chip away at my business degree so I can become an appraiser. It’s the number one most secure job in the United States, and it pays well, too.
It's a solid goal, but my college pace is complicated. I like UIC, but too many of the classes I need are scheduled at times that I can’t accommodate and so I’ve ended up taking extra years to fulfil my requirements. I don’t travel in the dark, so that rules out classes that start early in the morning or would require me to stay on campus too late. I also can’t fill up my days with too many classes in a row because then I wouldn’t be able to come home to eat and use the bathroom. A lot of my time revolves around the toilet; a major reason I did homeschool until I was sixteen. But Cliff convinced me I needed a real high school experience before college. And his parents helped convince Paula.
Dad’s paying the bill for college, and he doesn’t mind that I’m going so slow. He doesn’t mind anything about my life. If he has opinions, he’s keeping them to himself. Once in a while on our monthly phone call he’ll ask, “You thinking about moving out soon?” But that’s the only hint I get that he questions my choices. I get more advice from strangers on the train. It’s always been like this. I love him, but when he left us, he let Paula take on one hundred percent of the parenting.
I’ve had to put off the internship so long while I filled requirements that I’m on my last chance. If I don’t get a placement for this summer, then I’m out of the real estate program and lose my scholarship. I could still finish my degree in business, but we decided real estate appraiser is the way to go. Plus, Paula would deem that I’m certainly not ready to move out if I fail that big.
She leaves me alone and I navigate online to my internship folder, open it, then close it.
I think about that murdered girl.
Why’d Paula have to tell me that story?
Our world gets a little smaller every time we make a new ritual or safety practice. Eventually, we’ll just huddle in a closet with a toilet bucket and wait for the apocalypse.
I turn to my phone for the solace of distraction. None of my usual feeds are appealing today. I start a text to Cliff, but I can’t describe why I feel so bad. If he was here, I’d ask him to brush my hair or give me a back massage.
A woman speaks.
It’s my new, loud neighbor on the other side of our shared apartment-building wall. Our building is a horseshoe-shaped structure, that’s really like ten three-story walk-ups smushed together. Each of the ten walk-ups has its own stairwell leading up to six apartments with two on each floor. I never realized how thin the walls were between us and the apartment on the other side of the wall until this family moved in last fall. I haven’t seen them yet since we don’t share the same stairwell, but I hear them all the time. This one says, “My life revolves around fear and the fear keeps me stuck here at home.”
I get ready to knock on the wall to communicate, “Shut up please,” as her words sink in.
She continues, “I want my adult life to begin.”
Yes. Exactly.
Another voice, sounds like it’s coming through her phone or computer, asks her to explain.
I don’t knock on the wall.
I sit.
A realization sinks in — this is online therapy. I’m eavesdropping on therapy.
And I’m hooked.
When you read Picky by Julie T. Kinn, be prepared for a broad menu of emotions: laughing out loud and grinning like an idiot one chapter, cursing and screaming at the characters in another, ugly-crying and feeling uncomfortably vulnerable in yet another, and finally, rooting for them all over again. Because this cast of characters is highly imperfect, and sometimes unlikeable, if we're being totally honest about this, but they're deeply human and full of heart, and you'll find yourself wanting them to win.
And winning for every character is going to look wildly different. Main character Zillah has to start facing her fears and outgrow some of the ways in which she was raised, not just to "prove she's an adult" at twenty-three but to explore herself as her own human being. Her best friend, Lise, needs to keep facing her fears, centered around social anxiety and rejection. Her "friend," Ben, needs to give up what's comfortable to go after what he loves. Her ex-boyfriend, Cliff, needs to learn to take care of himself without a housemaid or mother figure present. And speaking of mothers, Zillah's mom, well, Zillah's mom could start to learn to take accountability for some of the things she's done wrong in her life, no matter what the motivation and intention was behind the action; that would be a good place to start.
This book is very much centered around the need for change and personal growth, and that puts each of these characters face-to-face and uncomfortably close to life events that force them to explore new paths, whether that be a fall down the stairs, meeting a stranger, driving fifteen hours to the ocean, or eating something new. The sky is the limit for what these characters can do to work on themselves, and that's honestly the beauty of it: seeing them explore through therapy, conversation, friendship, family, and love new circumstances and tasks... and actually taking the leap and trying it.
And they fail along the way, especially Zillah, who sets off this whole Picky tirade with eavesdropping on her new neighbor's therapy session through their shared bedroom wall. When she begins listening to the sessions and questions how she could apply the conversations and activities to her own life, to begin facing her own fears around eating very few foods, driving in the dark, and sleeping alone, she begins to take little steps in a new direction, toward a new Zillah, which opens the door to new friendships, and new independence, and new love.
Picky by Julie T. Kinn was such an incredibly fun and empowering read. We all have things we need to work on that could be potentially be holding us back, and it could be as simple to move forward as to pick up a strawberry if we only give ourselves a chance to try. If you're looking to try something new this summer or be adventurous, Picky would make an incredible summer or beach read!