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“I am tyrannical about noise and about quiet. I don’t feel that I can control the amount of mess I make. I mean, I know I can, but I kind of can’t. And there’s just so many things about my character that are really detrimental to having a writing process, which I need, and it’s just so opposed to everything that’s going on in my disgustoid little spirit.” — Rax King, author of Sloppy.

Ep. 484 features Rax King, whose new essay collection is Sloppy: Or: Doing It All Wrong. It’s published by Vintage. As I tell Rax in this conversation, I hadn’t been reading a lot of what I’d call “fun” books, or I wasn’t having much by way of fun reading for a long time and that changed with Sloppy, which isn’t to say the book doesn’t have its heavy moments, but it’s couched in a buoyant and irreverent voice that I found very appealing.

Like Melissa Febos, Rax is something of a quote machine with acerbic wit that made this episode really electric. That’s something I notice from voice-heavy memoirists and essayists. Like, if you’re not throwing heat as an essayist, you gotta work on your game. Maybe there are some who can lyric their way through, but that’s not my taste, personally. I need people pointing out the absurdities and their complicity in the absurdity. I don’t even know what that means, but it sounded good.

Rax King also is the author of Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer and the co-host of Low Culture Boil with Courtney Rawlings and Amber Rollo. Rax’s work has been nominated for a James Beard Award and has appeared in Food & Wine, MEL Magazine, Glamour and Electric Literature. You can learn more about Rax at her website raxkingisdead.com or follow her on the gram @raxkingisdead …

We talk about revisions, her sobriety, her sloppiness, money issues, steady-income spouses and a lot of other stuff. She really brought the heat.

CNFin’ Snippets

“I am tyrannical about noise and about quiet, because it’s like, I don’t feel that I can control the amount of mess I make. I mean, I know I can, but I kind of can’t. There’s just so many things about my character that are really detrimental to having a writing process, which I need, and it’s just so opposed to everything that’s going on in my disgustoid little spirit.”

“I think most people would do well to pretty much write the way they talk.”

“To toot my own horn. One of very few things that I am 100% confident about as a writer is that my work always sounds good because it always sounds like me, and I am generally a funny person. It’s one of the things I have going for me out of like, three total things.”

“I do love to revise. There’s that little obsessive guy in my head who loves to just dig into a draft and spend all day identifying exactly what’s wrong with it, and like fixing it, I love to be in that mode.”

“If I did not have a husband with a union job and good health insurance, I wouldn’t be able to hold on to this career.”

“Taking it away from that addiction memoir space was a way to deny the easy payoff of like, well, I used to be a fuck up. I quit drinking and drugs. Now I’m not. No, I’m still such a fuck up. I’m gonna be a fuck up probably for the rest of my life.”

“When you’re reading your draft with an eye to revising it, the moment when you start to get bored by your own writing, readers got bored 10 sentences ago, and that’s when you need to drastically cut or condense or do something to diffuse that boredom. And when I heard that advice, my thinking was, Well, that can’t possibly be true, because the reason I’m bored is I’ve read this draft 64,000 times, and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And no, that’s not correct. It’s the opposite. I am much more interested in my own work than I can rely on anyone else to be. And so if my work starts to bore me, and if I start to get distracted reading it, I have to trust that I am more excited by it still than anybody else is going to be.”

Rax’s Rec

The band Sexfaces

Parting Shot: Mis En Place

This episode with Rax started by me asking her about the calming effect of people who are gloriously tidy. Rax and I are definitely sloppy.

Watching Derek Sarno’s YouTube channel is very calming for me. I also like Aki the Japanese Minimalist, but with Sarno, he’s huge on mis en place, preparing all his ingredients before he cooks. He puts them in deli containers and he obsessively cleans his station, his cutting board, his knife. When he used to cater at people’s houses, he made sure he left the host’s kitchen cleaner than when he arrived. Kinda like the old camping slogan: leave the place better than you found it.

Now, Dana Jeri Maier looks at a clean desk with a heavy bout of skepticism, and I largely agree, but what if I could do something similar with my cook station, meaning my desk? What are the ingredients I’m cooking with? Here’s my notes, here’s these articles, here’s this book. When you’re mind is so frenetically frantic, so batshit all over the place, then taken up to 11 by caffeine and fascism, creating a sense of calm and clarity around the workspace makes a lot of sense to me. It’s a little more work up front to get everything ready and in its place, but there’s something to be said for keeping things in order and staying on top of it.

That’s part of the reason I’m so attracted to the idea of tiny houses and tiny living because you have to work within the constraints, the constraints make decisions for you. You only get to keep 20 books, not 300. As my wife says, humans are like gases, we expand to fill our spaces.

Right now my cook space is not ideal. I have four books, a DVD, two handkerchiefs, a ruler, two pencils, a dirty bowl from breakfast four hours ago, and a cup of ice coffee that is depressingly room temp.

Yeah … this whole mis en place is a work in progress.