TACKY

A vibrant collection of essays from the host of the podcast Low Culture Boil celebrating the tacky and tatty.

In her keen debut, King taps into her lifelong love affair with low culture in this joyful tribute to the tacky and argument that the “rightness so many intelligent, capable people pursue does not actually matter one bit.” In the introduction, the author lays out her take on the topic: “As far as I’m concerned, tackiness is joyfulness. To be proudly tacky, your aperture for all the too-much feelings—angst, desire, joy—must be all the way open. You’ve got to be so much more ready to feel everything than anyone probably wants to be. It’s a brutal way to live.” Among the many topics King discusses: the music of Creed (and Scott Stapp’s “gorgeous” face) and Meatloaf, sexting, American shopping malls, Cheesecake Factory (“straddle[s] an impossible border between casual and fancy”), and films and TV programs most critics disdain. Throughout, the author connects points in her life to cultural touchstones, showing a fearless willingness to share her personal history and view with readers. She argues that when comparing high and low culture, “what’s low may drag out for years as slow and hideous as a funeral dirge, but it still hits hardest, every time.” In the end, whether describing her teenage discovery of Hot Topic (“full of orange- and green-dyed heads as richly hued as Truffula trees”), her first marriage through the lens of the video game “The Sims,” or delivering a heartfelt essay on her connection with her father over Jersey Shore, King deploys a reliably consistent blend of humor, emotion, and insight. “Life is short,” she writes. “It’s important to attach oneself to the pieces that stick, regardless of whether somebody else believes the stuff is any good.”

An engaging, hilarious, unabashed look at what we love in culture and why we should value it for what it is.