Ask Me Anything: Rax King Gets Personal

Rax King, author of “Tacky,” on writing and publishing essays.

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RAX KING ON GETTING PERSONAL IN THE WRITING PROCESS

Writer and podcaster Rax King joined Study Hall on September 21, 2022 for a conversation about her essay collection “Tacky” and the publishing process. During the hour-long discussion, Rax shared insights about writing personal essays without giving away too much of yourself, tapping into past memories to write from experience, and how she landed a book deal for her essay collection. You can find a summary of the conversation below. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

 

Study Hall: Can you tell us about how “Tacky” came to be, both from a writing and a publishing perspective? 

Rax King: “Tacky” began as a conversation between two essays I’d already published — “Love, Peace, and Taco Grease” at Catapult and “It’s Time to Let Meat Loaf Into Your Embarrassing Little Heart” at Electric Lit. I hadn’t been planning on writing an essay collection, and was in fact at work on a novel, but I realized that I had something of a preoccupation with trash culture and its role in my life. 

At the same time, because the Catapult essay had gone viral, editors and agents were cold-emailing me to ask if I was working on any “projects.” So I decided trash essays could be a project and signed with the agent I thought had the most closely aligned vision for that “project” with my own.

From there, it was a frankly pretty charmed road to publication. Both my agent and my editor are people who cold-emailed me in that “projects” stage, but every step of the way somebody  was telling me “essay collections don’t sell.” Multiple agents tried to convince me to write the same book as anything other than an essay collection, and they were wrong! It hasn’t been a New York Times Best Seller or anything, but it has done really, really well!

SH: What is it about “tacky” things that feels particularly generative to you as a writer? How did you know that was something you wanted to write more about, after the success of those first two essays?

RK: It’s not so much that so-called tacky things are especially generative to me as a writer. I definitely got blocked up a number of times as I was drafting. It’s more that I have a genuine love for every piece of pop culture that appears in “Tacky” and only realized after writing those first few essays that the unifying thread was, in fact, tackiness. 

As some of the reviews of the book will tell you, there are places in the book where my criticism feels a little phoned in. Again, people kept telling me not to write personal essays, and that I needed the criticism to legitimize my work, even though it’s not the thing I do best and never has been. If I had the same level of baby-bird-imprinted attachment to more respectable items of the culture, I would’ve written about them. Instead, I have fast food and reality TV, so I wrote about those.

SH: How did you convince your agent and editor to move forward with a project they said wouldn’t sell?

RK: To be clear, the agent I ultimately signed with didn’t think the collection wouldn’t sell, though she did warn me that essay collections could be tricky. 

I deliberately picked an agent who had a couple other personal essayists as clients, because I know it’s not the most fashionable type of writing in the publication world. I also wanted someone who had a track record of treating the form with respect. 

Some other agents I met with were significantly more agnostic about the chances of my collection selling in the shape that I insisted on writing it in. Even though they seemed enthusiastic about working with me, I didn’t think it was a good idea to take my collection too far afield from the vision I initially had for it.

SH: What was publishing an essay collection built off of a viral essay like? Did the response to “Love, Peace, and Taco Grease” prepare you for publishing the book at all, or were they totally different experiences?

RK: They were definitely different experiences in terms of the scale. Nothing in the world could have prepared me for the sheer quantity of things I had to do in service of my book’s publication, from interviews to radio spots to a really fun VICE profile where Bettina Makalintal took me to three different chain restaurants in the course of like an hour. 

In the case of “Love, Peace, and Taco Grease” going viral, I was lucky that the response was so overwhelmingly positive, such that basically all I had to do was sit back and absorb all the nice stuff that people were saying about my writing. I didn’t have to work for that success, and I really had to work for “Tacky.” I’m sure the experience is quite different with writers whose work goes viral in a less-than-overwhelmingly-positive way.

SH: What was hard about writing “Tacky” that you didn’t expect? You mentioned getting blocked during the process. How did you deal with that?

RK: I teach classes on how to write personal essays well. (As opposed to the much-maligned trauma-porn variety that was so popular back in the 2010s). One thing I always tell my students is that you need to find a way to convey intimacy in your writing without feeling obligated to convey actual intimacy, if that makes sense. 

This bit of advice came up while writing “Tacky” because I kept hitting these walls with Things I Suddenly Realized I Didn’t Want To Talk About. It’s actually a really tricky thing to run into those walls, because you don’t want your readers to think you’re holding something back, but you still want to, you know, hold the thing back — people can smell that from a mile away. 

Some Goodreads users have said that my book seems like a lot of oversharing to them and I’m like, thank you! Because if it seems like I’m sharing a lot, then you definitely can’t tell how much I’m refusing to share, and that means all this tricky shit I had to do to pull off that sleight-of-hand was successful.

SH: How do you manage to walk that line in your writing, creating that feeling of intimacy without getting into territory you’re uncomfortable sharing?

RK: I guess the easiest way to show what I do in that regard is to show what I don’t do, which is alluding to something I don’t want to describe fully, but then moving on quickly without explanation. 

I see this with my students all the time, and I look at it as an attempt to square literary reality with reality exactly as it happened. Writers don’t want to lie (nor should they!), but they don’t want to tell the entire truth either. And so they compromise by saying almost explicitly, “Hey, there’s this other thing that happened. It was so ugly that I don’t want to talk about it, so I won’t. But I want you to know that it informs all this other stuff I really want to talk about.” The second you pull a move like that, the only thing your readers can think about is what’s behind the curtain you just drew. 

Throughout my work, I share stuff that’s apparently well to the left of what the average person is comfortable sharing with strangers. But you’ll never see me point to this cordoned-off section of brain space and announce that I’m not going to let you see what’s back there. 

Maybe that is part of why I like writing about myself in the context of pop culture so much. Not because it gives me an out from talking about ugly things but because it gives me a way to talk about them on the level of allusion and implication without seeming like I’m holding something back to protect myself. Basically the rule of personal essay writing is to always protect yourself, but never seem like you’re protecting yourself. Don’t show the mechanism by which you keep your brain safe from scrutiny and you’ll be fine.

That reminds me of something a novelist whose name I can’t remember once said about a sex scene he wrote when he was young. He pointed out that as soon as the sex scene starts, his language becomes very vague and flowery and pretty, and it’s essentially the author telegraphing his discomfort with the writing task he’s set for himself. If you can’t avoid that discomfort, don’t write about whatever’s causing it until you can.

SH: You write a lot about sex in this book. What’s the connection between sex and tackiness, as you see it?

RK: Honestly, any personal writing I do is liable to be about sex, which has played a huge role in my life. But in the context of “Tacky,” I wanted to dig really deep into sex because it’s this unmentionable, vulgar thing to bring up in conversation. I wanted the overall tone of this book to be something like your best friend’s big sister telling you dirty stories while you listen with your mouth totally agape. So I wanted to talk about sex not on a theoretical level, and not really even on the sex-scene-level, but in that gossipy teenage way.

SH: In Dwight Garner’s rave review of the book for The New York Times, he wrote, “King has unfettered access to her mind at 14 or 15.” How do you tap into that part of yourself, or those memories, when you’re writing?

RK: I think anytime a writer’s especially good at writing a particular phase of life, it means that some part of them is still living it, which is not to say that I’m one of those people who’s constantly looking up her middle school bullies on Facebook. I think I do that the normal amount. But granting yourself that access to a younger version of your brain is about finding the similarities between that brain and your present day brain. I may not still be fixated on being “cool” or currying favor with popular girls, but am I still sex-obsessed and boy-crazy? Yeah, at least enough to square the circle between teenage Rax and current Rax!

SH: Can you say more about making a living as a writer? You write for various outlets, you just published a book, you teach, you have a podcast, you have a Patreon — how do all those pieces fit together?

RK: I definitely keep myself busy! My Patreon newsletter is my bread-and-butter, it’s where I make the majority of my money. I usually freelance once a month, and I either teach my Catapult class or work with students privately to fill in the rest of those gaps. The book’s advance ran out months ago, and royalties haven’t started coming in (and are liable to be minimal, because everyone’s are), so that isn’t presently a factor in my monthly freakout about my finances. And my podcast “Low Culture Boil” is not so much a moneymaker. My cohost Amber Rollo and I live on separate coasts now, and miss each other, and use the pod as an opportunity to gab about trash culture once a week even though we can’t see each other. It is the cult favorite of anyone who likes the sound of sleepover chitchat, but it doesn’t help me get out of the hole every month.

I should probably get a real job, but…I don’t want one! I’d rather get by and struggle sometimes than do well and have no time to write.

I should also note that even this kind of struggley degree of making-a-living is mostly possible because I have a lot of Twitter followers. The success of my Patreon hinges on being able to consistently promote to a big audience. 

SH: Do you have any advice for writers trying to build an audience and build a platform for themselves?

RK: The advice I give my students is to be a little bit of a reply guy, RESPECTFULLY, and CHOOSILY. Follow lots of editors and writers and talk to them a little. You’ll be ignored a lot, and some people will probably think you’re annoying, but as long as you are a respectful and choosy reply guy you’ll be able to build some kind of following. I firmly believe that anyone who uses Twitter long enough and consistently enough will build a respectable following, even if it takes a long time.

To be honest, I only decided to get good at Twitter because I was hooking up with a guy who made fun of me for having fewer followers than he did. Spite is the only motivational tool that consistently works. 

SH: Has anything about the way you work changed now that the book is out? What are you working on now?

RK: I am now hard at work on the novel that I tabled to finish “Tacky.” Writing fiction exercises different muscles from writing essays — I think that maxim to write every day makes a lot of sense in the context of a novel, since if you give it up for a long stretch, you have to spend lots of time reorienting yourself in it once you pick it back up again (some excellent advice I once got from CRIT’s Tony Tulathimutte). But I still write personal essays every week on my Patreon, and because I’m secure in the knowledge that tens of thousands of people aren’t reading it, I’m much more candid there than I was even in my book!