Killing Yourself to Live

Chuck Klosterman is a pop culture guru of sorts. Just ask Chuck Klosterman. But Chuck Klosterman's real passion is writing about Chuck Klosterman.

There. Now you know what it's like to read Killing Yourself to Live. Don't be misled by the title, or the conceit that the author sets up at the beginning of the book: that Spin magazine practically begged him to go on a road trip and muse about all the great rock 'n roll deaths. Oh, sure, there are rental cars and desolate towns where low-grade rockstars died like, well, rockstars, in fiery crashes or pukey overdoses. There are even a few interviews with locals about where, exactly, half of the Allman Brothers Band checked out. But the parade of dead guys never even approaches the main stage. That's reserved for Chuck's musings on all the women he has loved/still loves/doesn't really love, but still sleeps with/will ever love.

Depending on your perspective, this could easily be false advertising. If, say, a person picks up the book wanting to know more about that nightclub fire in Rhode Island and how the members of Great White are subsequently holding up--and finds hundreds of pages of Chuck talking about some chick who is now dating an architect--then something is going to be way off. But if one is reading it for the sake of reading Chuck Klosterman's witty one-liners, it just kinda fits, in a resigned kind of way. And there's another camp as well: if one read Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and thought, "Hey, there's just not enough personal info about Chuck in here," then this is a perfect book. On any given page, I found myself vacillating between all three of those modes. I can't actually stay mad at good old Chuck. Mostly because I probably wouldn't have picked up a book about dead rockstars anyway if his name weren't on it.

That's why it's so frustrating when he gets bogged down in the details of the three main women in his life. There are entertaining anecdotes, most of which have more to do with Klosterman's own history and not necessarily the chicks (like a few pages about his "nemesis," or bits about how a thoroughly midwestern kid adapts to urban writer hipsterism). And even when he's obsessing about Diane, Quincy, or Lenore (none of whom I can tell apart) ad nauseam, he still makes quality, funny observations that transcend the belly gazing. So my patience hovered around The Line for much of the book, mostly giving him the benefit of the doubt based on general wittiness. That is, until everything kind of implodes in a multiple-page wreck of a simile in which he compares every woman he's ever met with every member of KISS. Seriously. What might have been cute for a paragraph or two is merely horrific after about three pages. Maybe I just don't care enough about Gene Simmons's solo work, or about the freelance drummer who performed with the band on one of its reunion tours. But my God....there's no real justification for this. Had he tried to link the women to John Lennon, Buddy Holly, or one of the other dead musicians, he might have been able to justify it on a structural basis. But alas...not so much.

Yet I can't condemn the book (or Klosterman) overall because I can't stand KISS, or because of a torturous love letter to the band that was clearly the author's real goal in getting a book deal to write about musicians. After all, it's still Chuck. I knew what I was getting when I grabbed the paperback at Borders. I just wish he hadn't bothered with the obvious effort of trying to push a memoir through a strained metaphor about how musicians have to die to be real rockstars. I probably would have paid the same cover price for something called Chuck's Chicks: Or, How I Pissed Off Every Woman I've Touched.

Some favorite passages, which guarantee I'll continue to read whatever frustrating wackiness he publishes next:

On trying to explain why the book is metafictionally messy: "In all probability, you will also complain about the author's reliance on self-indulgent, postmodern self-awareness, which will prompt the person you're conversing with to criticize the influence of Dave Eggers on the memoir-writing genre. Then your cell phone will ring, and you will meet someone for brunch." (18)

On how Fleetwood Mac's Rumours was an album about the band's own hookups and breakups: "Predictably, Q always took Stevie Nicks's side in the debate, and I always aligned myself with control freak Lindsey. 'The fact that Lindsey Buckingham even wrote a song like this proves he's a jackass,' Q would say. 'What kind of asshole forces his ex-girlfriend to sing backing vocals on a song that accuses her of being a slut?' In retrospect, this does seem egocentrically vindictive. Still, I think Stevie Nicks totally had it coming, especially in light of the fact that she later shacked up with Don Henley." (142)

On writing and one of his women: "A few months prior, I had also written a piece about Lenore that ran in GQ, because that's the kind of thing self-indulgent, first-person writers inevitably do. I have no idea what compels me to do these things; I will never understand why I need to write about the events that other people merely experience. And even though Lenore understands that this is how I am, she remains uncomfortable about having thousands of people read about my personal feelings toward her, particularly when the things I write are often things I would never say.
'Why didn't you tell me you loved me?' she asks by the lake. 'It's on the second page of your book, but you never actually said it to me. Not even once.'
'That's not true,' I say. 'I told you I loved you seven times.' This is technically accurate but intellectually fraudulent; I've told Lenore I loved her on seven occasions, but three times were in handwritten letters, three times were in emails, and once was when I was drunk." (173)