Pizza Orlando
Novel project
28.11.17, 22:51 – Nina: I’m crying as I write into digital nothingness, but it’s all real here with me. I want to be your partner, not your sidekick.
Clara and Nina have known each other since they were teenagers. When they meet again after many years as adult women, Nina is already suffering from the first symptoms of an incurable disease, the Huntington’s disease. She lives in Berlin. Clara lives in Hamburg, separated from the father of her two children. The two fall in love and plunge into a frenzied love affair. Pizza Orlando, borrowing from Virginia Woolf’s and Vita Sackville-West’s correspondence, is the disclosure of their chat history. While Nina, despite her limited lifespan, is fighting for future prospects, Clara, as a single mother, struggles for self-determination in an everyday life of child care, studies and wage work.
The daily communication between the two also unadornedly reveals a reality of life and the questions that arise as a result: Why don’t they, as two women with two children, get a family ticket at the swimming pool? Why is Clara afraid of going to the laundromat in the evenings, alone among men, and no one is afraid of her?
Pizza Orlando tells of illness and social exclusion, of motherhood and sexuality, of hope and despair in queer love and of the power of storytelling.
Excerpts of the manuscript were published in the literary journals BELLA triste and Die Epilog.
The text is represented by: Elisabeth Ruge Agentur