The Essays in “Sloppy” Are Anything But

“Kelly says she can’t drive me tonight,” I lied. “She has a…boat ride. With her uncle. From Anatevka.” 

…When I got to his house hours later, two quarts of his favorite chili in my overnight bag, he looked crabby. “Did Kelly really have plans tonight?” he asked. “Because I’ve been thinking about what you said on the phone for three hours now, and I’m pretty sure that was just the end of Fiddler on the Roof.”

So progresses the titular essay in Rax King’s new collection Sloppy: Or Doing it All Wrong (Vintage, $18), in which writer and internet personality King recounts her long and colorful history of truancy. At equal turns acerbic and disarmingly charming, Sloppy is anything but its title. King’s first essay collection, Tacky (Love Letters To The Worst Culture Has To Offer) established her as a singular voice in a crowded landscape of confessional writers. A New York Times review of Tacky posited: “King writes about herself in the manner Martha Graham taught her dancers to move across the stage: She leads with her crotch.” 

Of course, it is not all odes to Meat Loaf’s discography and Bath and Body Works’ Warm Vanilla Sugar lotion (although those things are—thankfully— present). In “Love, Peace, and Taco Grease,” first published on Catapult, King recounts both the end of her abusive first marriage and her relationship to Guy Fieri. No other writer today can marry the sweet and the bitter—or, the Guy Fieri Donkey Sauce and the bitter—the way King can. 

King makes it clear she is not the kind of Jew who grew up wearing itchy tights to High Holidays services. She did not receive a silver Tiffany necklace for her bat mitzvah (nor, seemingly, had one in the first place). No matter, and frankly—all the better. Her essays make for a joyful romp through an anti-stereotypical kind of Jewishness too often relegated to the margins. 

Personally, I offer a grateful endorsement of her recollections of growing up as someone with a Jewish dad who didn’t come from money or bother putting her through Hebrew school. King’s dad, by her telling, was a grade-A Old Dad, the archetype of which is expertly dissected in the essay “Some Notes Toward a Theory of An Old Dad.” He is in highly specific company: Alex Portnoy (“No other type of person would waste his one opportunity to narrate a great novel on a book-length psychoanalysis session”); Eve Babitz (“Reclusiveness being an old dad’s trait, [she] was one”). Larry David is not cited, but his cynical presence haunts every line. 

Sloppy is peppered with effusive Yiddishisms (King is a noted and current Worker’s Circle student though she notably fails to describe any of her admired Old Dads as alter kockers). When she tries to describe her other self—the one that kept her, until a few years ago, in the snares of substance abuse and addiction—she uses a metaphor that is quietly devastating: Party Golem. “I’ve stopped thinking of my party golem as an evil alter ego who does things I’d never do. She lives in me, I am her home…My task is to learn what her problem is and help her heal.” 

This is, perhaps, the most hopeful (if slightly nontraditional) conception of a golem I’ve encountered. Imagine a lumbering humanoid construction intended to allow its creator to indulge, then brought to heel and re-tasked as a protector. 

King’s conception of a golem speaks to her original mind, present throughout the book. She imagines a golem that needs to be spoken tenderly to, a golem sprung not from folklore but from necessity. Yes, perhaps it needs a few tries to get it right. But who doesn’t?

Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler is a once and (hopeful) future Angeleno, and the co-editor of An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi).