SLOPPY

A veritable mess slowly resolves into something approaching normality in this spry confessional.

Imagine a red-inked, angry declaration “sloppy” on a piece of grade-school homework, and then stretch that into an early life of blundering around: “It’s described me too many times, and in too many contexts, for me to remember who-all said it and why,” writes King, whether charged with being a sloppy drunk or having been raised to sloppy standards with no expectations of success or happiness. “My family is drunks the way other families are Teamsters or actors,” she writes, but she took that propensity well beyond alcohol to whatever drugs happened to cross her path. A stint in college ended in King’s working in a strip club (whence her nom de plume), although, she allows, “in reality, I was less a stripper than a daringly dressed cocktail salesman.” King’s memoir recounts a succession of hard knocks, from an abusive first husband to a brush with suicide (“an unfortunate but plausible method of avoiding enemy capture”). King, who has a few surprises to reveal along the way (a love of playing banjo, for one), is nothing if not self-aware; she allows that drugs and drink were an ultimately successful way of evading the patches of boredom that she now accepts, and she has smart things to say about her evolving feminist consciousness, with a confessed resentment for the fact that “so much of my teenage life was done to me by men.” It’s not as if she’s wholly adjusted to ordinary social expectations (“I remain an implacable shoplifter, and I still throw temper tantrums that would better befit a six-­year-­old”), but it seems as if she’s on the path.

An entertaining memoir of a train wreck of a life, and of picking one’s way out of the rubble.