Rax King is the People’s Champ

Her new book Sloppy is a sticky salve for the deep social crevasse

Originally I thought it would be clever to title this review “Rax King is the Queen,” but then I thought considering the climate, using a monarchy to celebrate someone might not be the witty praise I was intending. Since I know King has a fondness for The Rock, and since her new book Sloppy succeeds not in it’s rule over it’s subjects, but in uniting the people I changed the title and still got to be a wee bit cheeky.

For those of you on a time budget, before I go into a self-obsessed, political, fawning review, let me just quote the back of my Kiss Kiss Bang Bang dvd which quotes Peter Travers review of the film, “I couldn’t have liked it more. A special kind of pleasure.” If you even have the slightest bit of appreciation for my writing, then I imagine you will love this book. Grab it here.

This is a book review so why do I need to be cheeky at all? What do I have to do with the quality and content of King’s new book? Well as much as this piece is about the book, like everything I write, it’s also about me. Reading is a personal affair. While anyone can and should read Rax King’s upcoming collection of essays, what I found truly exceptional was King’s ability to make the book unfold like an application for club membership. Not her application, but the readers. Essentially it serves like a bulleted list posted on the outside of a treehouse. If you can relate to addiction, loneliness, social ineptitude, petty crime, the service industry, parental dynamics, then you belong. The only thing is, everyone can relate. It’s not an exclusive club. It only feels that way. It’s an inclusive club which is my favorite kind.

At the time I was reading Sloppy, I was also reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. King writes about her follies, while Yuval writes about how Homo Sapiens evolved and conquered. One is about a person. The other is about all persons. You might think they have little in common, but really what they have in common is pretty much my grand takeaway. It’s true, the scope of King’s book is narrow. It’s about one person’s trials and tribulations through sobriety, friendship, infidelity, depression, spending, roommatting, fitness, lying, and many more of life’s booby traps and self-impaled petards, but its reach is broad. It’s a study in what makes us all alike. Sapiens studies skeletons in the earth, Sloppy studies them in the closets. We’re all linked. The mark of any great work of art is its ability to be both surgically personal and universally relatable.

Rax writes fondly about her dad’s need to lie, and her own lines of bullshit. The irony is this is honest writing about dishonesty. How can you not feel connected to someone who is revealing even about their deception? We all lie, and we lie about lying. Reading about Rax’s lies or inability to socialize is so bonding, it’s like superglue for the shameful. And because it’s in a book, it feels like having the magician select only you to see behind the curtain. Even if everyone reads this book, and that is of course the hope, one’s most coveted confessions will always feel like an olive branch of friendship.

That’s why I must insist you read this book. So that we can be closer. Our lives are so scrubbed of imperfections, every post vetted over, every photo taken a dozen times, that it is really hard to connect with anyone beyond the vague notion that they would like to be immortalized in one specific lighting, whether that be twilight hour or on permanent vacation. I can like your photo or share your video, but from that angle I can’t really like you, and we haven’t shared anything. I only know what you covet, which tells me very little. King shares not just what she likes, but what could be identified as her unlikable qualities and that makes her extremely likable. Not that her writing has the faintest whiff of campaigning for adoration. The kind of liking I’m talking about is the kind that one has for the bus driver who lets you get on when you don’t have the fare, or the teacher who takes you aside and says “keep it up,” or the co-worker who invites you to their house for a BBQ. I suppose I’m describing kindness, which this book is not. It’s not unkind, maybe to the author at times, though I think the writing bleeds self-love. The DNA it shares with kindness is that it exudes the kind of unflinching confidence in reaching out to someone for connection that overrides any risk.

Fondness has many roots, but one is assuredly a recognition of self. For me, it’s the self I can’t shape and can’t exorcise. It’s the champion of hide-n-seek, it hides well from others, but always finds me immediately. We all have a shadow version of ourself, but when we cast our gaze out, we appear to be the only one standing in the light. I have to assume you have a shadow too, or risk the thought of being the only actual freak of nature on the planet, but to assume is to make an ass out of me, because I don’t really know you. Though I bet if I did, we would be friends. That’s the magic of King’s writing. It’s like that scene in Lethal Weapon 3, where Detective Martin Riggs and Lorna Cole from Internal Affairs show each other their scars from being in the line of fire. Each reveal is more grisly and requires more undressing. While Cole was first tasked with investigating Riggs’ partner, a recipe for disdain, the two wind up falling for each other once they see they’re both broken people doing their best. I know the third movie in an action franchise starring a repulsive man is not the best case for this book, but I also think it just might be the kind of sloppy comp that King would appreciate.

In another chapter, King writes about working at a fancy restaurant in the front of house, a relatable job if there ever was one. To cinch the seams of community even tighter, King wonders in words about a story from Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality involving a low rung staff member tasked with a shit job of securing sleds for a grand gesture. Later King remarks about how she drank the kool-aid at the place she worked, and then when she’d pissed it out, realized that they wouldn’t even mourn her absence after she quit. These two details sum up much of how I see the world. The working class makes the bourgeois bougie (pretty much everything in the gig economy), and that no one but you will appreciate the blood, sweat, and tears you put into making someone else a profit. Are these shameful admissions? No they are not. But when sandwiched between chapters on cigarettes and cocaine, one feels empowered to have their own opinions on what sucks about celebrating the rich life and climbing the corporate ladder. You can have bad habits, make bad decisions, do bad things, and still be right in thinking someone who treats others poorly is a bad person. And as importantly, worthy of redemption. There’s a spot in the treehouse for all of us.

In the last chapter of the book, Rax draws observations from The Wolf of Wall Street and what it is saying about addiction. She writes about how much boredom comes with sobriety and that, for her, addiction was to fight off boredom. In the year of our lord 2025, I couldn’t help but supplant the current state of America on to this description. It’s possible America is an addict, and we haven’t just fallen off the wagon, we split our head open on the railing and bit our tongue off. We just got bored, and wanted to be unshackled from boredom so bad, we set the house on fire after we’d gotten in and removed the door knobs. Life got too comfortable. Not for the world, not even for most Americans, but enough billionaires and aging boomers got so pampered that they felt bored. And that boredom was a real boner killer. In the book Sapiens, the author, attributes gossip to our dominion over Neanderthals and all of life on earth. Telling stories is how we built trust and societies and strategized and thrived. Well without the lion stalking us from the brush, or the possibility of going hungry, we all had little to keep us engaged. We weren’t going extinct, but we didn’t feel alive. So we returned to our roots. We started talking shit. We started fabricating more stories, and generating fiction. Things got un-boring. We hurled insults, we spread lies, we posted pics from our best days (just another form of lying), we cancelled, we went viral, we influenced. As Rax would say, we weren’t seeking a drug, we were seeking what a drug replaced. Boredom. Then we got sober. In 2020 we elected a boring president and got off the sauce. I remember when Biden first got elected, everyone said how nice it was to not have to pay attention to the news anymore. How it was such a relief to have a boring president. It was a relief until it wasn’t. We all stood around not knowing what to do with ourselves. Boredom once again felt like death, so we went out and got an RV and went to cook meth in our underwear.

I know that’s an oversimplification. The Biden administration supported the genocide happening in Gaza, and did a fucking number on immigration, and lied about our Chief’s mental acuity, and probably did a shit ton of other non-boring very bad things. And I really didn’t mean to get political on here. All I really wanted to say is that what our current administration has done such a bang up job at is making it seem like having flaws is a bad thing (they’ve also seriously distorted what a flaw is, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish). They paint everyone else as being inept and deficient and sloppy. All the while, they are a big vat of uncreative ignorant diarrhea with poor taste.

If we were to borrow from Rax King’s approach, if we were to be honest and reflective and own our mess and our sloppiness, then perhaps we would see that we are not the wrecks we fear we are. We wouldn’t need to circle the flaws on others like a Sorority hazing just so we could feel less shitty about our own sins and afflictions. We’re a species that is worried about being rejected from the pack. So we hide our lameness while pointing out the runts. But the truth is there is no perfect pack and life is a rigid rock face looking ten stories down, and sometimes the only way to get down is to hurl yourself off of it and flail. To get to the bottom is an achievement and there’s no reason to scorn yourself or anyone else for how they got there, so long as you don’t step on those also making their way down. There is no survival in being the single pretty piece at the bottom if you’re alone. The only comfort is in being all tossed around and mashed together in one messy pile. We endure by being Sloppy. Rax King leads the way.