The Klosterman Files : Killing Yourself to Live (2005)
Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story is supposed to be about two things: rock stars and death. That’s what is being sold to you on the back cover: “For 6,557 miles, Chuck Klosterman thought about dying…” and whatnot. He originally took this road trip for a Spin piece that is definitely about rock stars and death. But Killing Yourself to Live is a book about driving across America alone, listening to music, visiting friends, famous musicians death sites and thinking about death, literally and metaphorically. It’s also about Chuck Klosterman a lot.
If you want smart, biting criticism about the significance of a rock star death, you can read pages 221 to 235 (the last fourteen pages of Killing Yourself to Live) where Klosterman talks about the death of Kurt Cobain and how it both redefined his own legacy and the lives of 90s kids in general. How you felt about Cobain’s music, passing and legacy became what mattered the most about him. Having lived through it myself as an 11 year old, I remember people at school who were not into music at all, suddenly being into Nirvana. It’s hearbreaking when you think of it.
Because Kurt Cobain notoriously never wanted to be a rock star. He did his absolute best to wreck his own career: showing up at gigs barely able to perform, sabotaging television performances, destroying his instruments so he wouldn’t play encores, etc. But everything he did made it worse. Fans and critics kept looking for hidden meaning in his antics. Whenever he did something fucked up, he became more of a genius. Even in death, Cobain could not escape an adoration he didn’t want. Self-destructing only lead to audiences constructing an idol out of pieces of him.
But that’s the most serious rock star death analysis you’ll get from Killing Yourself to Live. It’s not a book about the cultural significance of rock star death as much as it is one on confronting your own morality through rock star deaths. It’s about being alone in a car and the women you love not really needing you in their lives. As he’s traveling from a death site to another, he’s thinking about different romantic failures and endings of all sorts, which is what people mainly think about when they’re alone. Chuck Klosterman’s mortality in Killing Yourself to Live is metaphorical.
That makes sense if you’re a 30-something, high achiever who’s always understood himself through cultural experiences. Death is both a failure (of your body) and an ending (of your life), so it makes sense that you first experiment the anxiety associated to it through not being enough for somebody. I experienced these feelings way earlier than that, but I can relate. This book has been highly criticized for being egocentric and solipsistic, but what else is a man driving alone for 6,557 miles supposed to think about if not his own fucking life?
Killing Yourself to Live is the next best thing to riding shotgun to Chuck Klosterman for three weeks and having him talking your ear off. You have to love the guy and the way he thinks more than the idea being sold to you by the publisher for it to work, but it did work for me. Also, there’s a scene where he meets his wife Melissa Maerz about two thirds in, which is really cool. Killing Yourself to Live was originally meant to be about endings, failures and death, but it ended up being more than that.
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Is Killing Yourself to Live a pertinent read in 2020? Uh…. yeah? Kind of. Our relationship to celebrity death has been completely overhauled by social media. It’s not easier than ever to become an artist’s most rabid fans on the day of their death. I know a lot of people (high two digits) who I never even heard discussing David Bowie when he was alive, who suddenly showed up on Instagram with tears-streaked Ziggy Stardust makeup, thanking him the tremendous impact he had on their life. I enjoy Bowie’s music myself, but it was never significant to me.
Basically, what happened to Kurt Cobain in 1994 happens on a smaller scale to most mainstream artists to die nowadays. But there’s more to an artist’s death than claiming ownership. Take Bowie for example. Unlike most people, I never felt any connection to the Ziggy Stardust era. I understand why it’s important to people who feel marginalized, but I’ve never had any direct contact with that Bowie when the feelings of alienation were at their worst. The Bowie I know and remember is the Bowie of Outside and Earthling, two albums he released in the 1990s.
These albums were not objectively better than the Ziggy Stardust era.They just spoke to me more directly. The latter are a statement against the repression of marginal sexuality, but I never felt marginalized sexually so I never really gave a shit about Major Tom and all. I felt alienated and demonized for my own feelings and desires like the black clad, cigarette smoking Bowie in The Heart’s Filthy Lesson. Because I thought no one understood them. I was kind of wrong about that, but not entirely.
When something ends (a life or a relationship. Whatever). It gives you an opportunity to understand yourself better because you now have a complete portrait of it. You can either say “oh she was a bitch, she never understood me” or “I was his biggest fan” but it’s in the nuances and the in-betweens that you reveal yourself and this is what Chuck Klosterman does in Killing Yourself to Live. He refuses the absolutes. He refuses to feel the same way than everyone about things we all experience and that’s why I believe Killing Yourself to Live is well-worth being read in 2020.
