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Jul
23
Book Review: Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield
2008 at 7pm Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
When author Rob Sheffield met his wife Renee, they had nothing in common, except they both loved music. A certain song came on, and each noticed the other perk up to listen; and they were the only two people in that bar who were excited to hear the song. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl talk about music. Boy offers to make girl a mix tape. And so it begins.
Love Is a Mix Tape is part memoir, part music history, and part love letter from a heartsick man to his late wife. Throughout their courtship and marriage (which was only five years and ten months), Rob and Renee made mix tapes for all occasions–driving, doing the dishes, falling asleep, hanging out at home on a Sunday afternoon–and it was their secret language. Each chapter of the book is structured around a particular mix tape, as Sheffield reminisces about the music that brought them together and provided the soundtrack for their relationship. As he listens to the tapes later on, years after Renee’s unexpected death (she had a pulmonary embolism and died at home in his arms), he writes,
Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I’m a mix tape, a cassette that’s been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape…I count on the music to bring me back–or, more precisely, to bring her forward.
Sheffield’s love for his wife and his struggle to accept a future without her are powerfully palpable and ever-present. His grasp of the ways in which love and music change us and shape our lives is quite beautiful, and though you feel Sheffield’s sorrow and sadness, you also feel the joy and comfort and sense of place and permanence he has found in music. If you took the perfection that is Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and replaced all of the place memories with music memories, you’d get Love Is a Mix Tape.
Writing about one of those wonderful falling-in-love moments, Sheffield says
There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides here in this car, with this girl, on this road, listening to this song. If she breaks my heart, no matter what hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now. Out the window is a blur and all I can really hear is this girl’s hair flapping in the wind, and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else.
When I read that, I thought, “Yes! Me too! I know how that feels.” It brought to mind Stephen Chobsky’s description of feeling “infinite” in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. We should all get to experience such wonderful moments of solitude with the ones we love, and we should all be so lucky as to have a soundtrack as great as Rob and Renee’s mix tapes.
It’s virtually impossible not to be affected by this book. Sheffield’s writing caused me to reflect on the music that has shaped my life, and it made me think about the songs that have already formed a memorable soundtrack to my relationship with my husband. This is a great book for anyone who loves music, knows someone who loves music, or has ever been in love. If you’ve never been in love (poor you!), it will make you want to be. It made me more grateful for my husband and the life we’re fortunate to share with each other, and it made me hope that, if something did happen to me, he’d be able to hold onto the music and the memories and remember me with such passionate tenderness. This book is happy and sad and beautiful and awful, and I think just about everyone could enjoy it. 5 out of 5.
Related posts:
A mixtape for every conceivable occasion? I thought only I did that. Well, I guess I’ll read this book.
[...] I took a musical trip down memory lane with Rob Sheffield, whose book Love Is a Mix Tape (review here) broke my heart and caused me to reflect on the music and relationships that are most [...]
[...] Love is a Mix Tape [...]