Love Is a Mix Tape is the one book of 140 or so I’ve read in the past two-plus years that came the closest to actually making me bawl. Not figuratively, in the sense of “Oh, I was so sad that I could imagine myself crying at that one part if I hadn’t been sitting on the Fairfax Connector 980. And if I had been tired and maybe a little drunk.” I was literally blinking my eyes and focusing my breathing to fight off the crying.
It’s not so much that Rob Sheffield is a brilliant writer – he’s fairly plain-spoken and kind of a smart-ass. You might know him if, like me, you enjoy the funditry of VH1 shows like “Top 100 One-Hit Wonders” and you appreciate the contrast between the low-wattage celebrities like Chris Jericho or Hal Sparks who wax snarky about their own personal reminisces and the slightly more cerebral talking heads (who are usually writers) called upon to vocalize the greater context of whatever’s being discussed. Rob, a reviewer and columnist for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, obviously falls into the latter category. (Usually I refer to authors by their last name but I find myself unable to call Rob anything but Rob. Reading his memoir makes me feel not like we’re, if not friends exactly, something beyond the usual author-reader reserve.) Rob is plenty smart and can turn a good phrase, but none of that is likely to dissolve me. Ultimately it’s what he says, not so much how he says it.
Rob and I have a few things in common. We’re around the same age, at least close enough to basically be part of the same American generation (he’s eight years older than me but he was still living like a college student in extended adolescence well into his twenties, so his life at 27 wasn’t that much different than mine at 19). We’re both northerners who self-transplanted via school to Virginia. We’re both into music, in many cases the same kinds of music, although we differ in degree of intensity (but, honestly, there are times when I wish I was as devoutly into music as Rob clearly is, and that bridges a lot of the gap). And we both were lucky enough to find our respective soulmates and marry them. Given all of that overlap, Rob could have written a memoir that was only about breaking into the music journalism biz, and I would have been drawn in. Given how much he loved his wife Renee, and how many illuminating details about her he’s able to summon up, I could have been absorbed in a fairly plotless recounting of their courtship. But there is a major difference between Rob’s life and mine: his wife died five years into their marriage. She was 31.
Love Is a Mix Tape opens with Rob going through some old stuff, letting the reader know that Renee is gone and that’s why it’s so important to him when he finds an old mix tape of hers, a tangible object imprinted with her audible fingerprints. Then it becomes a meditation on mix tapes and the intersection between pop music and human mating rituals, flashing back as far as Rob’s early adolescence but quickly catching up to the point where he meets Renee Crist and focusing on their relationship. Which, thanks to the opening framing device, the reader knows is tragically doomed. For me, this set up an incredible tension between my tendency to see myself as Rob and see his life as a slight variant on my own, and my need to distance myself from the impending disaster.
(There are a lot of very specific references to music in the book, as songs are the signifiers of time and place and zeitgeist and whatnot Rob uses to hang his recollections on. I knew a lot of the songs, or at least the artists, and plenty of them were new to me. Ordinarily I would find this super-cool to geek out about, but given the larger context of the book and my reaction to it, it almost seems superfluous. I just wanted to acknowledge it.)
I am supremely lucky in that I have never lost someone close to me prematurely. I’ve been to the funerals of three grandparents, but all were when I was an adult and both were more or less expected at the time. I’ve known people who died far too young, but they were acquaintances, friends of friends at best. I’ve never had to grapple with carrying on with my life and incorporating a noticeable void where someone used to be, someone who I expected would be there a lot longer. I’m very afraid of that happening, and of course my wife is one of two people who could escalate that fear to crippling, soul-ravaging terror if she were to take the used-to-be-someone role. Just like anybody else (except possibly the most morbidly-obsessed) I often confuse the fact that I can’t imagine something happening with the comforting but delusional belief that it can’t happen.
Whether he means to or not, Rob shatters that delusion. Renee died of a pulmonary embolism, which is one of those fatal anatomical accidents that can literally happen to anyone. Rob and Renee were not Sid and Nancy, they didn’t do drugs or live high-risk lifestyles, and Renee wasn’t genetically predisposed to breast cancer, or conceived by her parents despite being strongly advised by doctors that she would probably have some fatal inherited disorder or anything like that. Renee (in Rob’s telling, and I will totally give him the benefit of the doubt here) was a good person who took reasonably good care of herself and dropped dead with no warning. And there is absolutely no way of reading their story and saying, “Well, that won’t happen to me.”
It wasn’t Renee’s death that set off the waterworks for me. I had been braced for it all along, and I actually find it hard to be sad for the dead themselves. It’s much easier to be sad for the living and grieving, and moreso when reading someone’s memoir and feeling as though you’re really getting to know them through a common interest. And Rob is unsparingly honest about his grief once the memoir encompasses the day Renee died. He wallowed in his grief at the time, and his memoir takes its time recounting that period of his life in exquisite, excruciating detail. It is harrowing to read. At one point I reached the end of a chapter as my evening bus pulled into its bay and I closed the book and thought, “Whew, OK, I made it. I’ll set this aside and pick it up tomorrow, where I assume the narrative will resume with Rob getting better and moving on.” Back on the bus the next morning I re-opened the book and found Rob exactly where I had left him but most emphatically not getting better. And I soldiered on with him. Ultimately Rob did put a new life together – obviously, or there would be no book – but it took a long time.
Sometimes we read memoirs to vicariously experience a life we can’t have but sort of wish we could; sometimes we read them to see what we’re glad we don’t have because we emphatically don’t want it. Love Is a Mix Tape was both of those for me, but there was an additional layer in my experience of it that was probably the hardest part of all to reckon with. There’s another major difference between Rob’s life and mine: Rob and Renee never had kids. I mentioned above that my wife was one of two people I can’t sanely contemplate losing, and if it wasn’t clear that my son was the other person I was talking about, let me state so for the record now. The fact that I have a kid – a fact which brings me nothing but joy, a fact which lines up with the reality that I am fully living the life I chose for myself – means that I can never go through what Rob went through. Not the spouse cut down in the prime of life part – that’s still and always out there - but the complete and total breakdown while in mourning, casting off entire years wrapped in heavy gray shrouds. I don’t judge Rob in the slightest for falling apart under the circumstances, and every bit of me knows I would want to, too. But that is totally off the table. If I lost my wife I would have to pull my act together lickety-fucking-split, for my son’s sake. I pray with all my soul that I never have to find out exactly how I would manage that. But I was confronted with that realization as I read Rob’s journey, and I’m confronting it now as I write this. I’m honestly not sure if that confrontation or realization accomplishes anything or not, other than making me even more grateful for my good fortune holding out one more day.
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