Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

After reading through two collections of Klosterman essays and one and a half attempts at novels, I thought I had Chuck Klosterman figured out- he can't really tell much of a story, but works best at short-form essays that examine pop culture and the mundane. Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story throws a wrench in that idea though, because while it feels very different from anything else I've read, it has quickly become one of my favorites of his (although really Downtown Owl is the only book of four that I haven't liked). We join Chuck during his early days at Spin magazine, when he's tasked with a somewhat morbid cross-country journey- Chuck will visit and report on most of the locations of music's biggest deaths. The Allman Brothers' plane crash site, the hotel room where Sid Vicious probably killed his girlfriend, the greenhouse where Kurt Cobain made himself a legend- Chuck visits all of these and more on an assignment to determine some sort of meaning to all this death, with a particular focus on why dieing is such a great career move for musicians. Killing Yourself to Live however is not the article Chuck wrote for Spin, and might not be even close. The book does go into some detail on Chuck's encounters with these sites of rock-n-roll death, but really just chronicles whatever he thought about on those long drives and stops in small towns. It turns out Chuck considered himself in three different relationships at that time which were less 'open' and more 'unfinished', and the main focus of the book is Chuck trying to figure out whether he had experienced true love or if it was worth trying to mend whatever had gone wrong. It was quite a change of pace to see such open and very human writing from Klosterman; I'd say the biggest flaw most of his articles have is that they come off pretty robotic. I guess that will happen when you're writing about something as vapid as pop culture can be sometimes. Chuck doesn't shy away from his quick music anecdotes though, but here he can seamlessly work them into the story as a whole. Most famously Chuck discusses the impact of 9/11 on people's lives, and then jumps into why Radiohead's Kid A syncs up well as a soundtrack to the day. Overall it's not quite as smart and fun as Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs but I found this on-the-road narrative much more enjoyable than, um, On the Road.