Tacky
Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer
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3.9 • 15 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
An irreverent and charming collection of deeply personal essays about the joys of low pop culture and bad taste, exploring coming of age in the 2000s in the age of Hot Topic, Creed, and frosted lip gloss—from the James Beard Award-nominated writer of the Catapult column "Store-Bought Is Fine”
Tacky is about the power of pop culture—like any art—to imprint itself on our lives and shape our experiences, no matter one's commitment to "good" taste. These fourteen essays are a nostalgia-soaked antidote to the millennial generation's obsession with irony, putting the aesthetics we hate to love—snakeskin pants, Sex and the City, Cheesecake Factory's gargantuan menu—into kinder and sharper perspective.
Each essay revolves around a different maligned (and yet, Rax would argue, vital) cultural artifact, providing thoughtful, even romantic meditations on desire, love, and the power of nostalgia. An essay about the gym-tan-laundry exuberance of Jersey Shore morphs into an excavation of grief over the death of her father; in "You Wanna Be On Top," Rax writes about friendship and early aughts girlhood; in another, Guy Fieri helps her heal from an abusive relationship.
The result is a collection that captures the personal and generational experience of finding joy in caring just a little too much with clarity, heartfelt honesty, and Rax King's trademark humor.
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"As far as I'm concerned, tackiness is joyfulness," writes Catapult columnist King in her charming debut essay collection. Across 14 pieces that examine media artifacts tacky and tackier, King plumbs her own history to explore her—and society's—relationship to pop culture. In "Never Fall in Love at the Jersey Shore," the author bonds with her ailing father over reality TV, while, in "Love, Peace, and Taco Grease," she revels in the "technicolor majesty" of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives and reflects on the aftermath of her relationship with her abusive ex-husband. King balances her desire to understand her own past with an examination of America's cultural propensity for the tawdry; in an essay on the oft-maligned band Creed, for instance, she argues in favor of allowing oneself to embrace intense feeling and comes clean about her unwillingness to admit her love for the band publicly, writing, "I'd waved goodbye to sincerity too early." The emotion that runs throughout makes for a powerful antidote to jaded nonchalance: "I hope that people learn how to have a fun time with the things they love, even the silly-seeming ones, before it's too late." King's witty, conversational dip into nostalgia is a delight.
Customer Reviews
I really wanted to love this book
After reading, it seemed (to me) like a solid memoir that was meticulously filtered through a pre-social media pop culture lens, and it left me wanting more. The author is an incredibly incisive and an engaging, a true talent - I look forward to the next one!
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In all fairness, it’s quite possible that the book improves after chapter 2, but I couldn’t bring myself to continue reading it at that point - just too cringy.
The glue that. Binds us
I read the free sample today as I also read the free sample of Liarmouth by John Waters. They were both featured on The New York Times Book Review podcast. Waters got the lead but I think that was a mistake. It should have been Ms. King. Waters just makes tackiness taste bad. King smothers it with herbs and spices that delight the palette.