Review of Killing Yourself To Live, by Chuck Klosterman
Well, it only took me 8 years, but I finally read a Chuck Klosterman book. I first heard of Klosterman when he was a guest on the now-defunct podcast (but great podcast) Girl On Guy, with adorkable host Aisha Tyler. As a supplement to reading this book, I googled when his appearance on that show was, figuring it was around 2015. I was chagrined to learn that, like everything else, it was longer ago than I thought — by 3 years. I don’t remember, and in a way I don’t care to remember when I first heard the podcast, but I’m guessing it was that year or 2013. Either way, he was a really engaging guest and Aisha Tyler was a good fit for him because they’re roughly in the same age range (mid Gen-X), and they’re both somewhat into nerd culture, but him more on the music side, obviously. Well, obvious to someone who knows who he is.
This was enough for me to always want to read one of his books, one of which has the extremely enticing and delicious-sounding title “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs”. Maybe that’s the one I should’ve read. That seems to be his most famous book, although that could partly just be because of the name.
The premise of this book was really cool. The execution was confusing. In fact, as a sort of incidental disclaimer at the end of the book, he recounts a phone conversation he had with his boss (Whatever she was — I don’t remember. She’s the woman who gave him the assignment) where she specifically requests: “Chuck, please don’t write a book about women you used to be in love with.” And I agree. I don’t know if this was a bait-and-switch, or a kind of writing style that I just don’t appreciate, but why would you advertise the book as being about a pilgrimage across the country to visit the death-locations of various rock stars, and then write about the reminiscing about the various failed relationships you’ve had in the past? I so wanted to read about what the book was, um, about.
He sets it up fairly well. He works for a Spin magazine (keep in mind most of the events of this book take place in 2003), and his boss gives him the enviable (to me anyway) assignment of renting a car to drive across country to visit, in geographical order, different places in the country where notable musicians have met their untimely deaths. Well, I’m a person with morbid curiousity who also happens to love rock music and all the erroneous romantic notions that go along with it, so this should be an engrossing book for me, right?
I don’t want to come across too negative, so I will say that obviously I was able to finish the book, and Klosterman is a good writer, even great, but why not take the material that you actually have and write about that! He spends a lot of time explaining the different drug experiences he’s had, and past relationships he’s had, all while painting himself as an awkward, anti-social guy. Well if he’s that awkward and anti-social then how has he hooked up with so many women and had so many conversations with random people? Already I’m not interested because this is not why I bought the book, but I actually am awkward and weird and have very little social contact outside of where I work, so it kind of feels like a gut-punch to me. And more importantly, it’s disingenuous. I think I’m partly comparing the Chuck Klosterman of this book to the Chuck Klosterman of the podcast, and realizing that they don’t necessarily match up.
Chuck Klosterman himself would probably find the following comparison flattering if he read it, so I’ll just add that what the subtle bragging reminded me of as I read it, was the Slash autobiography. Slash is a certified interesting person™, if only by virtue of having been in one of the biggest rock bands in history, so when every other page seems to be about what women he hooked up with or how many bottles of Jack Daniels or vodka he consumed, it’s almost confusing. In the case of Killing Yourself To Live, it’s confusing because it makes about 3/4's of the text seem like a tangent.
As you read this, you might think he didn’t have very much material, but that’s the weird thing, the book feels like a tease because he definitely did what he set out to do, but saved all of his introspective musings for things completely unrelated to his assignment.
I guess this goes under the heading of Monday-morning quarterbacking (football was another tangent), but I found myself thinking that it would’ve made sense had he prepped himself for his unofficial music memorial visits by listening to the music of the dead person. He made it a point that he brought 600 CDs with him, and I thought that was absolutely charming, but the music he wrote about seemed largely unrelated to the places he visited. He writes about listening to AC/DC when looking for Robert Johnson’s titular crossroad, and Radiohead’s Kid A while driving to Duane Allman’s motorcycle accident.
Maybe I’m partly annoyed with myself. I was hoping for some kind of explanation as to why I, like him and so many others, am interested in the early deaths of musicians. It’s almost like the amount of time shaved off of their normal lifespans somehow paradoxically is the icing on their musical cakes.
He redeems himself somewhat when talking about his last pitstop — Seattle. Here’s an excerpt from one of his best musings in the last chapter. I snarkily commented “or it means you couldn’t find the bridge” on one part of the paragraph but then underlined what I thought was particularly meaningful:
I suppose that encapsulates my somewhat split view on the book. He’s an engaging writer, but I wish he had spent more of that energy on dead rock stars instead of dead relationships.
