Sloppy: Or, Doing It All Wrong

Memoirist King (Tacky) tackles grief, addiction, shoplifting, and mental illness in this brash, darkly funny essay collection. “Sloppiness,” King argues, isn’t just a trait—it’s an identity, as essential to her as her asthma (“and I take medicine for both”). Early essays cover her family’s alcoholism; her habit of cutting class to nurse hangovers, go to IHOP, or celebrate a liberating breakup; and her practice of swiping clothes from Brandy Melville to “stave off the DTs.” Her father’s death prompts some of the collection’s most poignant reflections: his ashes now share space in her apartment with his beloved Big Mouth Billy Bass statues and ashtrays (“In death, he too has become crap”). The subject matter is often bleak—King writes candidly of her suicide attempts and calls sobriety “the birthplace of boredom” (she’s sober now)—but her razor wit ensures the tone never veers into self-pity. Instead, she provides a bracing, brutally honest account of living outside the bounds of respectability. This will resonate with fans of gallows humor and readers who feel stifled by restrictive definitions of normality. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary. (July)