Sloppy

The week, Rax King came on Tasteland to discuss her new essay collection, Sloppy. We discussed writing sober, a service industry draft program, playing the banjo and more.

Read an excerpt of our interview below or keep scrolling to listen to the full episode.

Francis Zierer: This is your second book, and it's a very different book from your previous book Tacky, right? 

Rax King: This book is pretty different from the first one. The thing fueling that first book was a steady diet of cocaine and bourbon and self-loathing and all kinds of bad behavior that I then stopped doing and wrote a new book Sloppy. And so the tone is not the same. The vibe is really not the same. It's a little bit darker than the last one.  

Daisy Alioto: Does it feel like there's less of a barrier between you and the material in this new book because your experience of writing it wasn't mediated by substance?

RK: For a time, it was sort of the opposite because being high and drunk had been so key to my process for so long. I did not know how to think without being high or drunk, much less how to write. I spent a little bit of time flailing around and trying to find some new way to write the book I'd been contracted for. I figured it out eventually. And then I could trust in my writing more. There wasn't that thing like Hemingway said, “write drunk, edit sober.” It's really bad advice, because if I would write drunk, editing sober just meant cutting out all the stuff I said when I was drunk. It was such a shockingly inefficient process. And it's not like that anymore. I can pretty much trust, even if I end up changing something, that it's not terrible as written. It's much more organic and less mediated and just less embarrassing, frankly. 

FZ: Maybe at times you're talking about dark parts of your life, but it's written in this way that is generously vulnerable. 

RK: Yeah, totally. I think it's a very honest book, but I invited my mother to a reading that I did from Sloppy. And I read from a chapter that's about the week that I spent in a mental institution. And after the reading was over, my mom came up to me and she was like, “That reading was really funny, but I remember that week and it was the worst one that either of us had ever had.” And I guess that's more what I mean when I say that this book is darker than the last one. 

DA: With the first book, there is the opportunity to get hung up on the semantics of what “tacky” means. With Sloppy, it's much more about an emotional truth than a cultural definition. 

RK: Anytime the word “tacky” is used, I get a million tags from people, and I get asked to arbitrate disputes about taste. I'm certainly not complaining, but that's just not really what I was going for then. And it's certainly not what I'm going for now. What I would like people to take away is that I'm just some dumbass farting around. And I think there's great value in reading work that is not trying to answer questions about, in this case, taste. I'm not writing Sloppy to issue proclamations or to tell people how to feel about things. I'm just talking about myself. And I think that's something more books should be doing, frankly.  

Any time a piece of personal writing gets popular, there's this really tedious debate about, “Do we know too much about each other?” Just really silly stuff. I don't know too much about people. 

I would like to know more about more people. I would like there to be more personal writing, even if that means wading through some of it that is bad, because I want to get at those emotional truths and I think the way you do that is by reading other people's lives, not so much by reading other people's opinions. 

FZ: In good personal writing, part of what makes it good is that by the end of it, there's this suggestion of a direction of truth, but there's no definitive answer.  

RK: I think that temptation is really present, the temptation to have every essay in this book end on a note of, “But I fixed it.” That's not the reality for me. I'm the same person, and if I stopped doing something that's bad for me, I still have all the character flaws that led me to do it in the first place. My tone here is pretty upbeat and funny, I hope, but I didn't want the takeaway to be some fairy tale, happily ever after, “I fixed all my problems” thing.  

DA: I really liked the part about working in restaurants. Were there things that you would have liked to say about that experience that you had to leave out of the essay? 

RK: It would have been very easy for me to turn that essay into 7,000 words of griping. I want to say it was Bill Buford writing Heat, he said that restaurant labor is one of the forms of art where you can see what the patronage looks like still. There’s something about the interplay between a person going into a restaurant knowing they are patronizing the arts, versus the relatively low price point. And so it creates this ugliness, I think, in restaurant patrons. I think that if you have not worked in a restaurant, there is no way for you to know what that's like. There ought to be a draft in America: when you're 18, you get entered into the draft automatically, but it's not for military service, it's for food service, or it's for retail. I get yelled at about this every time I say it. I still think I'm right. It's not a class war thing. It's to learn how to be around people.  

We live in a society where all of us have to be customers all the time because most of us don't know how to make the shit that we use. So multiple times a day, I am put in a position where I have to take my stupid little maxed-out credit card to the store and I have to say, “Pretty please, mister, can you unlock these razors for me?” That's bad for the soul to be on the customer side of that interaction. I honestly think, put everyone in the service industry draft. Everybody has experience now, both on the customer side and the service side.  

SLOPPY FT. RAX KING