Rax King Is More Than a Food Writer

Calling Rax King a "food writer” would be reductive. She can write about food—she has the James Beard nomination to prove it—but she can write about anything (and I would read it). Whether it’s finding solace in “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives,” choosing the perfect lyrics for an AIM away message, or begrudgingly navigating sobriety, King’s writing is introspective without being solipsistic, poignant, but never trite, and funny.

On a recent call over Zoom, the writer-cum-teacher-cum-podcast host sat down to discuss effective food writing, the innate challenges of writing a personal essay and her non-alcoholic beverage of choice. Her newest book, “Sloppy, Or: Doing It All Wrong,” is on sale now.

Why do you think food lends itself so well to personal essays, particularly those that have to do with trauma or heavy emotional subjects?

That's a great question, and I've thought about it a lot in the context of teaching all kinds of creative non-fiction, and where I keep landing with it is that actually most people's memories are pretty bad. I certainly struggle to remember things often. And what's great about food is that it provides such a grabby sensory hook.

Even if I struggle to remember precisely what was said to me by someone or what I was wearing, if we were having a meal, I will often remember the meal in pretty rich sensory detail. And that allows me access to other things. If I'm able to re-inhabit the juiciness of a specific burger that I ate during a specific conversation, that will usually help me wrangle my way back into my mindset and my body at the time to an extent.

Famously, our memories try to paper over trauma as much as they can to protect us. But something else that I think happens is that we end up telling ourselves really well-worn narratives about traumatic experiences, which I'm sure serves a similar self-protecting function. That's the other thing about something as sensory and as memorable as a really important meal. It helps me to break past whatever story I've been telling about a well-worn memory. And it helps me to remember what my hands were doing, and remember the stickiness of ice cream dripping down the back of my hands or whatever it is.

When I was reading your Grub Street Diet, you mentioned kratom, which you didn't have to do because technically it's not food. But when I read that I thought, “I trust this person immediately as a narrator.” How do you know what details to include?

This is not a perfect rule, but I do find that as I'm chugging along through a draft, if I encounter a detail about my day, which my brain is immediately like, “Let's be cagey about this, and maybe let's not talk about this” and “You know people don't need to read about you getting a mouthful of disgusting, chalky kratom powder right when they're reading a Grub Street Diet.” That moment of internal resistance often tells me that that's a really good detail to include. I hesitate to say that, although I've said it before publicly, because I think what people take away is if something makes you feel ashamed and uncomfortable, definitely tell the whole world about it. But no, I'm a pretty secretive person, actually. I have a lot of secrets, but I think there's a lot of value in using your little internal stud finder to find those secret places inside of yourself that could theoretically bear a narrative. Even if it's something uncomfortable, or embarrassing especially. If it's a load-bearing thing, it's a load-bearing thing.

Reading your book “Tacky” felt like swapping war stories with an old buddy. And “Sloppy ” feels like it has a tough love angle to it. Was that your intent?

I do think that “Sloppy” is definitely darker than “Tacky.” “Tacky,” goes to some dark places for sure, but the mood is mostly pretty upbeat and jovial, and that was deliberate. It was true to me and my voice at the time. That was the side of myself that I wanted to draw out in that collection. It seemed well suited to the task of talking about Creed and Hot Topic and Bath & Bodyworks, all that stuff. And in this case, much of what I'm talking about is itself darker. I'm talking about my history with alcoholism, my history with addiction, times I have seriously mistreated people in my life, ways I've misbehaved.

I don't want to be the pratfalling buffoon in the story of my struggles with addiction.

And I thought, as I was writing, I could take the easy way out here and just be constantly presenting this as a series of pratfalls and really trying to make it light. And while I do think that it's more funny than not—I hope—I'm not trying to make fun of myself start to finish. I don't want to be the pratfalling buffoon in the story of my struggles with addiction. I want to be a little more brutally honest than that.

You're very good at not being self-indulgent or trite. I think both food writing and personal essays— it's very easy to be trite with both of them. How do you help your students avoid those potholes?

[Rax leans into the microphone] As Claire was talking about how easy it is to be trite in personal and food writing, I was nodding vigorously.

Yeah, it's so easy. And I think that's a big part of why at least personal writing does not have a great reputation. In literary and intellectual circles, there's this idea that it is inherently self-indulgent, [that] it is inherently solipsistic. And I think that done well, personal writing, as well as food writing, has the power to be the opposite.

I don't necessarily care about some guy's experience eating in a 300-bucks-a-head prefix restaurant. I don't necessarily care about the whole range of xoJane, “It Happened to Me,” you know? You remember that era.

I actually started at xoJane.

Did you really?

I wrote mostly about food, though. I don't think I ever wrote an “It Happened to Me.” But, I definitely know what you're talking about!

Isn't it funny that even talking about it just now, all I remembered about xoJane, forgive me, was that section, just because of how much attention those essays always got. And why they always got so much attention is most of them were custom designed to piss people off. They were indulgent often, or else they went vastly the other way, and they were just unvarnished re-countings of traumas that, as a reader now, I want you to get help, and I want you to maybe do some work on your understanding of this experience before you start publishing about it.

And I think that good personal writing and good food writing are constantly looking for ways to make connections between the writer's personal experience, which is always going to be highly individualized, and the ramifications that might have for everyone else's experiences.

I think that detractors of personal writing, who just hate it categorically, are closing themselves off to something really exciting...

What's so glorious about personal writing is that we live in this time of unprecedented ability to write and put your stories out there. You know, 500 years ago, how many of the people publishing essay collections now would have even been literate? I think there's a lot of power and magic in every individual person having the tools to write about what's going on inside their head. I think that detractors of personal writing, who just hate it categorically, are closing themselves off to something really exciting, which is the ability to poke around inside someone else's head and see what they've got going on in there. For me, personally, I never don't want to do that. I am deeply nosy.

When I was reading your essay on the Cheesecake Factory—I know everyone talks about that one—you described the brown bread as “tasting brown.” What is it about certain types of food that triggers this sort of synesthesia, where it's not a flavor, but a color?

That's a great question, and that's something that I've talked about in classes where I've been teaching about food writing. It's just universally pretty interesting when a food is described using a non-food word. Have you heard the saying, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” something like that? Food is a similar thing. Writing about it is like dancing about architecture, you know? It's really hard to convey the experiences of a couple of your senses to another person in a way that's going to be meaningful, and if you just lean entirely on flavor words and smell words—you know, bitter, sweet, acidic, funky, I guess. I'm running out of words. There's a lot, but I think that you're kind of cutting yourself off from another avenue of talking about the food.

That's what people come to writers for: descriptions that they wouldn't necessarily think about.

It's not just something that you taste or something that you smell. It's got all these other associations for us. And for me, I could describe that incredible brown bread as sweet and I can describe it as dense, both of which it is. I tried to make it like a billion times from all these dupe recipes, and I know there's all kinds of sugary goodness in it that you don't necessarily expect in bread. And that's another way you could come at describing food, just based on what's in it. But I think it's exciting in a small way to read something like, “The brown bread tastes brown, it tastes perfectly brown,” or it tastes, I don't know, some other non-food word.

Another example that always comes to mind talking about this sort of thing is, 10 years after Lana Del Rey's record “Born to Die” came out, I wrote a little retrospective about it. And when it came out, critics were using all these non-music words—"cinematic" and "lush"—to describe these really orchestral arrangements. And those are just plum more exciting words than "orchestral arrangements." You can't just repeat that a million times, you gotta inject some new life into this thing you're talking about. That's one way to do it, I think, and it can be a very effective way. That's what people come to writers for: descriptions that they wouldn't necessarily think about.

As a fellow non-drinker, I appreciated your callout of bitters and soda in “Sloppy.” I don’t like bitters and soda either. What is your non-alcoholic drink of choice?

I have a couple. Number one—I've written about this in Bon Appetit before—gotta shout out the Shirley Temple. It is the queen of non-alcoholic beverages, because aside from the Dirty Shirley perversion, it was never a cocktail. It's not like bitters and soda where you're pretending you're having a cocktail. It's its own thing. It's perfect. And lately, I've also been really into this concoction I make at home, which is just mango nectar and soda water.

I also really like non-alcoholic beer. If I'm going to a show and I want to look like I'm holding a can of beer, which it turns out I often want to look that way and I didn't even know it, but non-alcoholic beer is really good for that. And the Lagunitas Hoppy Water is delicious. It doesn't even taste like beer, which is the worst part of non-alcoholic beer, that it still tastes like beer. It tastes too much like beer.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.