“The happiest, saddest, sweetest book about rock ‘n’ roll that I’ve ever experienced.”—Chuck Klosterman
Mix tapes: We all have our favorites. Stick one into a deck, press play, and you’re instantly transported to another time in your life. For Rob Sheffield, that time was one of miraculous love and unbearable grief. A time that spanned seven years, it started when he met the girl of his dreams, and ended when he watched her die in his arms. Using the listings of fifteen of his favorite mix tapes, Rob shows that the power of music to build a bridge between people is stronger than death. You’ll read these words, perhaps surprisingly, with joy in your heart and a song in your head—the one that comes to mind when you think of the love of your life.
Praise for Love is a Mixtape
“A memoir that manages, no small feat, to be funny and beautifully forlorn at the same time.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Humorous, heartbreaking, and heroic.”—Entertainment Weekly
“The finest lines ever written about rock ‘n’ roll . . . Like that song on the radio, every word of Rob’s book is true. Love is a mix tape.”—Rolling Stone
“Many of us use pop culture as a mirror of our emotional lives, but Sheffield happily walks right through the looking glass.”—Los Angeles Times
“Sheffield writes with such aching remembering, you feel like you are invading his privacy . . . and it’s the truth of those details that make this memoir so touching.”—Newsweek
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
January 2, 2007 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307351579
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307351579
- File size: 3606 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from December 18, 2006
A celebratory eulogy for life in "the decade of Nirvana," rock critic Sheffield's captivating memoir uses 22 "mix tapes" to describe his being "tangled up" in the "noisy, juicy, sparkly life" of his wife, Renee, from the time they met in 1989 to her sudden death from a pulmonary embolism in 1997. Each chapter begins with song titles from the couple's myriad mixes—"Tapes for making out, tapes for dancing, tapes for falling asleep"—and uses them to describe a beautiful love story: "a real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl" meeting in graduate school a "hermit wolfboy, scared of life, hiding in my room with my records," and how they built a tender relationship on the music they loved, from the Meat Puppets to Hank Williams. Their bond as soul mates makes his reaction to her death deeply moving: "I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language." But Sheffield's wonderful, often hilarious and lovingly detailed stories about their early romance and their later domestic life show how they created their own personal "mix tape" of life in the same way a music mix tape "steals moments from all over the musical cosmos and splices them into a whole new groove." -
March 26, 2007
Music critic Sheffield's touching and poignant memoir of love and death will strike a chord in anyone who has used a hand-selected set of songs to try to express something that can't be put into words. A socially awkward adolescent, Sheffield finds true love as a college student in the late '80s with Renée, a "hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl." They're brought together by their love of music, get married and spend eight years together before Renée suddenly dies of a pulmonary embolism. Sheffield's delivery is not that of the typical actor/ reader. We come to know Rob as this geeky, lanky guy, and his reading is characteristically a little bit uncoordinated, yet it is tender and heartfelt enough to win us over. Each chapter opens with a song list from a mix tape made at the time. Listeners may wish that, as with Nick Hornby's essay collection Songbook
, there had been an audio component that would allow the music to take us back or would introduce us to new songs that helped Sheffield press on into an uncertain but hopeful future. Simultaneous release with the Crown hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 18).
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