Rax King Is Embracing the Mess

Now, I’m not an astrology girlie—which I think is technically a finable offense here in Los Angeles. But I do think the stars performed some elaborate cosmic choreography to ensure I shared a timeline with Rax King. Underneath her name, her email signature declares her the “Unofficial Writer-in-Residence at The Cheesecake Factory”—which confirms that we were also destined to become friends.

The James Beard Award-nominated writer and author of the wildly celebrated and critically lauded collection Tacky has bestowed upon us mere mortals a new banger. In Sloppy, King dives headfirst into the gloriously complicated parts of life: addiction, heartbreak, ADHD, grief, sex work—all the things (to quote my favorite musical, Chicago) we hold near and dear to our hearts. From her parents’ deep commitment to 12-step sobriety to her own indulgences like shoplifting from Brandy Melville, she explores the tangled web of addiction, impulsivity, and mental health with unvarnished honesty, sharp humor, and a refusal to tidy anything up for the sake of comfort.

A messy blessing sent from above, Rax King reminds us that embracing the mess is the truest form of grace.

Greg Mania: Like ‘“tacky,” I’ve always identified with “sloppy”—and I don’t see that changing, no matter how therapized, financially literate, or otherwise “grown-up” I get. How has your own relationship to tacky evolved alongside your claiming of sloppy? And what’s it been like to reconcile both as permanent parts of who you are?

Rax King: Well, “tacky” and “sloppy” are both words with somewhat negative connotations. Tacky things are understood to be in poor taste, while sloppy ones are understood as dirty or messy. These are two qualities of mine that I used to wish I didn’t have. I wanted to be the sweet, thoughtful, ladylike person, which is very funny to remember now—I can’t even picture myself as ladylike in my imagination. I probably could have become that person if I had the willpower for such a significant character overhaul, but we both know I don’t. It was either change or reconcile and, predictably enough, I picked the easier option.

GM: You call reconciliation the “easier option,” but it feels like there’s deep work in claiming these identities. Besides writing this book, what did that reconciliation actually look like for you—and do you still find yourself having to reconcile with those parts of yourself?

RK: Reconciliation of my, shall we say, less admirable traits is certainly an ongoing process. Actually, sobriety has helped a lot because, without substance abuse to fall back on, I have nowhere to hide from myself. Whatever flaws are in me, I now have to accept they’re inescapable. In practice, I’ll admit that means I spend a lot of time groaning and squirming, feeling mortified as I triage old memories that I never dealt with, but it’s better this way than living in a constant cycle of blackouts and hangovers.

GM: You and I both write about the messy truth of things—obsession, sex, desire, heartbreak, identity. But Sloppy feels like such a confident deep-dive into that territory. When did you know this was the book you had to write next?

RK: I quit drinking, and it was as if that “messy truth of things” had been waiting for me to sober up before it beat the shit out of me. In active addiction, it was easy to either glamorize my constant self-sabotage, or to numb myself from its effects before they could really wound me. In sobriety, all I could do was try to understand those ugly tendencies so I could repair the damage they’d done. So I guess Sloppy is me presenting my findings—the sloppiness undergirding all my choices, good and bad, and the changes I’ve had to make in order to live with it.

GM: Did sobriety change how you write—not just what you write about, but the actual process?

RK: I definitely had to find some new processes in sobriety. We tend to mythologize the roustabout writer who can only access his genius under the influence of his chosen drug, and that mythology allowed me to mask my self-destructiveness behind this guise of nobility, as if it were actually brave and appropriate for me to only write mid-blackout. These days, maybe because the inside of my head is quieter, I also demand that my workspaces be quieter—dead silent, ideally. It’s the only way I can retreat inward the way I think most of us have to do in order to write well.

GM: The first chapter hit me hard—I also lived with undiagnosed ADHD until adulthood, and getting that diagnosis made my whole childhood and adolescence click into place. I was diagnosed two years ago, and I’m still figuring out how to live with it. How is your life with it now?

RK: Oh, it’s great! I’m completely fixed! No, I mean, it’s a relief to at least know something is wrong with me—not something nebulous and impossible, but this specific, knowable, treatable thing. But at the end of the day, even if I can treat the problem, I can’t make it go away. They say that when you’re sober, you really need to watch your sobriety, because your addiction is out in the alley waiting for you and doing push-ups. A similar thing is true of ADHD for me. I have to make it a priority to hold it in check as sternly as possible, because the second I let my guard down, ADHD will come for me—and it’s stronger than I am.

GM: Another thing we have in common: taking our clothes off for money—and stepping into a persona to do it. You were a stripper; I was a go-go dancer. What did that version of you teach you about performance, identity, or control? And how do you relate to persona now?

RK: Honestly, my biggest takeaway as a stripper was that men are disappointingly easy to manipulate. I think I had been in their thrall until then, desperate for their attention, miserable whenever I felt like I was losing it. And a big part of what made those early relationships with men so hypnotizing was that I kept thinking of them as creatures essentially unlike myself. Like, they fell for me for reasons I didn’t understand, and lost interest for equally unknowable reasons. But in strip clubs, you learn how to effortlessly push their buttons—you have to, your income depends on it. Those jobs demystified men in a way that was mostly good, because it was a huge time suck to be constantly in the throes of one incomprehensible heartbreak or another, but there was also an element in it of learning that Santa Claus wasn’t real or something. 

GM: Let’s see—drugs and alcohol, sex and messy relationships, service industry jobs, money chaos… all things I’ve also lived, and all things you write about with so much heart, humor, and clarity. But before Sloppy took its final shape, were there times you wrote just to process—before you knew what was publishable? And what did that kind of writing teach you about what belonged in the book?

RK: I’m always writing just to process, so the answer to that question is yes, sort of—but the writing I do to process almost never makes it to publication. Oddball pieces might, like if I happen to generate a good sentence while I’m sob-writing, but it’s mostly important to me to maintain a firewall between therapeutic writing and the stuff I share with the world. I always tell my students that it’s inadvisable to write from an open wound. Good personal writing always feels like the author is exploring some dark corner of herself, trying to shine a light into it so she can map it out properly, but before I show people the fruits of that exploration, I want to make sure the dark corners are safe to investigate!

GM: How do you know when writing has crossed the threshold from therapeutic to ready for readers?

RK: I tend to maintain a fairly strict firewall between writing-as-therapy and writing-as-offering-to-readers. Some of the therapeutic stuff does cross that threshold, but it happens almost by accident—like, in trying to heal myself, I tell myself things I didn’t know I knew, and some of those insights feel book-ready, and others feel like things I really should have learned sometime in the anonymous LiveJournal years.

GM: You also write about grief—how memory can live inside the background noise of an object, like your father’s ashtrays, which suddenly become so present they feel almost haunted. When did you feel ready to write about that loss? And as a writer whose voice is naturally funny, do you feel like you need to metabolize grief with humor before it can live on the page?

RK: I started writing about my grief for my dad before I even got his ashes back from the funeral home, and I can’t even reread those early words about it, that’s how full of pain they are. At this point, he’s dead seven years—the grief isn’t gone, it’ll never be gone, but it’s not so lacerating that I can’t face it with humor by now. Although, that said, my grief vented itself through humor pretty frequently in the weeks after he died. I used to tell people very bluntly that my dad was dead, and then I’d burst into hysterical laughter for no reason I (or they) could understand. It was wildly inappropriate, which only made me laugh harder. Nothing was funny, but that made me feel like everything was.

GM: If Samantha Irby is my mom, you’re absolutely my sister. Who else would you cast in our literary family tree of funny writers?

RK: Aww, I love this idea! Definitely Kristen Arnett is on the family tree, and Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and Mattie Lubchansky. And I’d be quite remiss if I didn’t shout out the great Tommy Pico, who made me cry laughing when he read at Franklin Park about a million years ago.

GM: Tommy Pico—interesting, I’ll make a note to check out his work later tonight… when I go to his apartment… where I pretty much live… because I’m sleeping with him. Seriously though, how does writing alongside these and other writers shape your voice and your work?

RK: Most of the writers I admire, their voices are reminiscent in some way of the way they actually speak. That’s been hugely influential for me, this idea that the sound of one’s own natural voice can be transmitted to the page without passing through too many layers of self-conscious manipulation, and that’s the way I try to write.

GM: Sloppy is a love letter to messy, complicated personhood. What’s something you’re still learning to claim or embrace about yourself as you move forward?

RK: Ha, wouldn’t you like to know! If you’re reading this, I want you to assume I’m fixed and therefore normal now.