Love is a Mix Tape

Music can heal us, drive us to tears, warm our hearts, and express our deepest emotions. Rob Sheffield, writer for Rolling Stone, has a profound appreciation for all kinds of music--past and present. In this honest and sweet memoir, he recounts how music united him with Renée, a hip reflection of himself. They eventually married, and when their life together was cut short, Sheffield was devastated. In this book he cleverly uses an eclectic collection of songs he recorded on mixed tapes over the years to purge his grief and trace how he ended up who he is today. Sheffield makes us laugh and cry--remaining ever true to himself and the music he loves. B.J.P. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

March 26, 2007
Music critic Sheffield's touching and poignant memoir of love and death will strike a chord in anyone who has used a hand-selected set of songs to try to express something that can't be put into words. A socially awkward adolescent, Sheffield finds true love as a college student in the late '80s with Renée, a "hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl." They're brought together by their love of music, get married and spend eight years together before Renée suddenly dies of a pulmonary embolism. Sheffield's delivery is not that of the typical actor/ reader. We come to know Rob as this geeky, lanky guy, and his reading is characteristically a little bit uncoordinated, yet it is tender and heartfelt enough to win us over. Each chapter opens with a song list from a mix tape made at the time. Listeners may wish that, as with Nick Hornby's essay collection Songbook
, there had been an audio component that would allow the music to take us back or would introduce us to new songs that helped Sheffield press on into an uncertain but hopeful future. Simultaneous release with the Crown hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 18).