Jayme keeps making mention of this book; presumably because I have said so many things about it since I read it. I bought this book for a couple reasons: (1) because I love mix tapes, (2) because I love music and (3) because it was buy 2 get the 3rd free. I started reading it almost immediately and while it wasn’t one of those books I couldn’t put down, it was definitely one I wanted to keep reading.
It’s part memoir, part memory and part playlist. Rob starts the book talking about his life in general. And then goes into how he met his wife in the 80s and how perfect they were for each other, finding little ways to live their life in their own balanced way. Each chapter starts off with a playlist that described that moment in his life. Rob goes into why he listened to those songs then, what memories those songs bring back to him even now. Sometimes they’re rock, sometimes they’re random blues songs, sometimes it’s a bunch of songs by the same artist, sometimes it’s just completely random. But Renee suddenly died one day in their apartment. Rob was beside himself. There was so much buildup in the book about how great she was, how quirky and seemingly perfect for him and then she was just gone. You feel his pain because you’ve grown to love her as well. There is a part right after she died where he kept thinking the hospital was going to call and say it was just a mistake, that she hadn’t really died. He drives to the town where she grew up and takes the cordless phone in the car in case the hospital calls. It wasn’t a cell phone, it was just the cordless phone from his house. He knew it wouldn’t work, but somehow it made him connected. Rob has to learn to move on without Renee. He’s in his 20s and how do you do that? He spends on chapter talking about how he connected with Jackie Kennedy because she too didn’t know how to breathe after she lost her spouse. He didn’t know how to sleep in the bed without her there, how to talk without having her finish his sentences. This book was so grief stricken that you want to sit there and feel the pain with him because it’s almost too much to bear to move on. And it wasn’t your friend, your wife, your sister.
Rob has an ease in his writing that immediately draws you in. It’s more like he’s writing you a letter about a brief second of his life rather than you just reading a book. You want to cry with him, laugh with him, hug him. It’s such a deep heartbreaking story that you want to find him and pick him up and find some way to help him. But he knows that. He knew everyone was like that after he lost Renee. He talks about how he wasn’t sure how to tell people he hadn’t seen in years that Renee had died. You have to laugh reading this book about how his punk rock wife died right before Missy Elliott became big which was such a shame because she would’ve loved her. It makes you wish you could be like her or have someone love you like he loves her. It’s a beautiful book full of lines that seem to encapsulate the exact feeling at the perfect moment. I know how hard it is to put your feelings out there, especially about something as close to home as this, but he does it in such a touching tribute to Renee. And he knows that it’s exactly what she would’ve wanted.
