Ho-prah's Book Club

Romance sucks. That is, the traditional idea of what romance is sucks. Fuck flowers, the best first-date gift I ever got was a book my date thought I would like. Hearts and flowers and carriage rides, that stuff can’t hold a candle to showing up at the emergency room with a book and a clean pair of underwear. Love is in the details, which is why I fell head over heels for Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape.



I bough the book on a whim (it was 20% off at Barnes and Noble) expecting a light, gimmicky read with lots of music-nerd quibbling. Love is a Mix Tape IS about music, but really it’s about love, the most realistic portrayal of being in love with someone I’ve ever read. I read the whole thing in one night.

Here’s how Sheffield describes the girl of his dreams:

“Renee was a real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl. Her favorite song was the Rolling Stone’s Let’s Spend the Night Together. Her favorite album was Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted. She rooted for the Atlanta Braves and sewed her own silver vinyl pants. She knew which kind of screwdriver was which. She baked pies, but not very often. She could rap Roxanne Shante’s “Go on Girl” all the way through. She called Eudora Welty “Miss Eudora.” She had an MFA in fiction and never got any stories published, but she kept writing them anyway. She bought too many shoes and dyed her hair red. Her voice was full of the frazzle and crackle of music.”

Even more touching than Renee’s cool-girl bravado are her insecurities, and how intimately Sheffield is obviously acquainted with them. The passage I couldn’t get out of my head was the one where Sheffield describes Renee’s reaction to buying a particularly cool pair of shoes in a Boston Fluevog store.

“I told her about the day Renee bought the platform mod creepers and walked down Newbury Street, saying ‘Nobody in Charlottesville has shoes this cool. None of the skinny girls have shoes this cool. That skinny Lori from Georgia doesn’t have shoes this cool.’”

The fact that Renee dies young and unexpectedly makes the story even more affecting. After tearing through this amazing story, Renee was still flouncing through my thoughts and memory, fully fleshed out and moving around. And isn’t that a beautiful reason both for the writing of and the reading of this book? To let the dead get up and dance around.

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