“After Love Is A Mixtape, I’ll always have a soft spot for Rob Sheffield. That book was so terrible and sad. Being a widower at such a young age. I can’t imagine.
There’s a scene from that book. After the EMTs come to pick up his wife, he’s in his house and there’s EMT trash all over the floor. Plastic baggies that held all their stuff. All the stuff they used on his wife. I don’t have the best memory, but that scene never leaves me.
Then Rob wrote Talking To Girls About Duran Duran, which took us back to the 80’s and into 80’s music. I dug that one too.
This book picks up where Mixtape left off.
You can tell I’m a cool, insider-y kind of guy because I just call it Mixtape.
So what happens when a man is heartbroken? REALLY heartbroken.
Last weekend I saw the movie her . If you haven’t seen it yet, go for it. I’m not going to waste time telling you what it’s about because, like most Spike Jonze movies, it doesn’t really matter.
If you have seen it, real quick, I’d love to hear what you thought about it. About one particular part. I’m not going to spoil anything here, so don’t worry. The overall premise, did you find it silly and sort of shocking, or did it make all the sense in the world? I have an opinion on that one, but I wonder if it’s coming from the pretty weird place where my head lives.
Anyway, there’s a part in the movie where a very sad character says something like, “I think I’ve felt everything I’m ever going to feel. Everything else, it’ll just be lesser versions of feelings I’ve already had.”
That’s a pretty great summary of how it seemed Rob Sheffield felt after the sudden passing of his wife. Maybe like most people are lucky to get a chance at happiness, and to hope for a second one is just foolish and stupid, and you’re better off going to see Spike Jonze movies by yourself on the weekends.
I think Rob Sheffield’s writing is the strongest when he’s getting personal. Really, really personal. Which is a little weird, I suppose, because he’s a rock critic by trade. You’d think his best stuff would be about music.
I don’t mean to take anything away from his writing on music. I like it. Seriously. It’s just, well.
I’m a weird bookish guy. And since Mixtape in 2007, I’ve been a little worried about Rob Sheffield. Not worried like I thought I could rescue him from sadness or something. Worried because it was hard to tell where his story was going.
This is a writing theory. But here goes.
I think two kinds of people can write really tender, really revealing books.
One is the kind of person who is very in touch with emotion. If this is a man you know, you’ve probably seen him cry based on a story someone else told. The kind of person who is in touch with the emotions of others enough to understand them and write about them.
The other kind, I think there’s a person who feels a little bit like there’s not much left to lose. That all the worst things that can happen, they’ve happened already. So what does she care if people know how she really feels?
That second group, I worry about those people.
In this book, I think we see Rob go from the second, watchlist group, to the first, happy group.
Lots of other stuff happens in the book too. Music stuff. Karaoke stuff. But honestly, I blazed through that stuff to check on my friend Rob.
And now that I’ve managed to sound like a total fucking creep, I’ll go ahead and be done.
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