Rax King Hopes New BookSloppyWill Tell 'Someone What They Need to Hear, When They Need to Hear It' (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Rax King, “Sloppy” book.Photo:Andrew Janjigian; Penguin Random House

Andrew Janjigian; Penguin Random House

Rax King is back!

The James Beard Award-nominated writer has a new collection of essays hitting the shelves.Sloppy, due out from Vintage on July 29, 2025, “explores sobriety, begrudging self-improvement and the habits we cling to with clenched fists,” according to the book’s synopsis.

Penguin Random House

The 17 essays that comprise the collection “approach bad habits with emotional intelligence, kindness and — most importantly — humor.”

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In an exclusive email interview with PEOPLE, King shared howSloppycame to be.

“I originally intendedSloppyto be an addiction memoir, but my friend, the writer Lisa Carver, saw a super early draft of it and said it seemed more like a memoir of life as a ‘quiet f—up.’ That’s a term I use in one of the early essays to describe myself, and it ended up being the idea of the whole collection,” King shares.

“There are all these people, myself included, getting wasted and blowing out their lives and doing their jobs a—backwards wrong without anybody noticing,” she continues.

Rax King.Andrew Janjigian

Andrew Janjigian

King, who co-hosts the podcastLow Culture Boilalongside Amber Rollo, published her first collection of essays,Tacky,in Nov. 2021. That book focused on “the power of pop culture” and investigated how it “imprint[s] itself on our lives and shape our experiences, no matter one’s commitment to ‘good’ taste,” according to the synopsis.

Comparing the two works, King tells PEOPLE, “My second book does and doesn’t feel different from my first, in roughly the same ways that I do and don’t feel like a different person than I was when I wroteTackyfive years ago. I mean, both books are about my mistakes and crimes, so I’d certainly hope I’m guilty of different ones now!”

King, whobecame soberin 2022, says she hopesSloppy"tells someone what they need to hear, when they need to hear it."

“I never would have gotten sober myself if other books and people hadn’t told me what I needed to hear, when I needed to hear it,” she adds.

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, please contact the SAMHSA helpline at 1-800-662-HELP.

source: people.com