My heart feels like it is going to explode. My head is pounding, and the concierge opens my bottle of anxiety medication because my hands are shaking too badly. I am standing in the marble-coated lobby of the Sutton Place Hotel, two minutes away from meeting my personal hero and I feel like I am going to die.
Of course, Chuck Klosterman already knows death. In fact, he’s written a book devoted to the subject of death, celebrity, and the meaning of rock and roll. Killing Yourself to Live: 85 percent of a true story chronicles the SPIN Magazine writer’s journey across America as he visits various rockstars’ death sites.
Amongst the ghosts of Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crashes in empty cornfields and skuzzy Chelsea Hotel rooms, Klosterman spends a lot of time in his rental car thinking. He ruminates about celebrity death, he receives an ultimatum from a woman he loves, gives an ultimatum to another, and is ignored by a third, but mostly he rocks out to his 2,000-plus CD collection and occasionally makes stops along the way for authentic gravy.
Klosterman, a well-known American chronicler of pop culture in this crazy age we live in, has written two books previously. Fargo Rock City justifies why heavy metal is not only entertaining, but also vital. And Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, an essay collection explaining what various figures mean to pop culture, made me want to write for a living. Still, as a writer who deals in personal material, he’s faced a lot of criticism over the years. And he’s mostly okay with that.
“When you write about yourself, you’re going to realize that some people are not going to review your book; they’re going to review your life, and that’s okay,” Klosterman says. “What drives me crazy is when people say, ‘I thought this book was going to be like an encyclopedia of rock deaths, and I’m disappointed that it’s not this book that I imagined it to be.’ Or, ‘I thought that this book was going to be about music, and it’s actually about him.’
“When people review the book by reviewing the book that it’s not, I think that’s like somebody who goes to review the 40 Year-Old Virgin, and they get out of the movie and they say, ‘I really wanted to go to Wendy’s. And this movie was not at all like going to a fast-food restaurant, and now I’m disappointed.'”
The weird thing is, on the very first page, Klosterman states clearly what subject matter the book will cover. (Mastodons and eating breadsticks at the Olive Garden, apparently.) Still, audiences remain skeptical.
“There’s nothing intimidating about the way I write. At least, I don’t think that there is,” Klosterman offers. “Pretty much it’s like, these are people I like, and these are songs I like, and these are experiences that I had, and this is what’s interesting. Blah blah blah. That’s the book.”
Chuck seems more like a regular person as we speak. We are sitting across from each other drinking coffee. It feels a bit surreal, though. He’s wearing a t-shirt with a gorilla on it and has this crazy North Dakotan accent that sounds either completely ridiculous or incredibly charming-and the more we speak about culture and why Thom Yorke is almost a modern-day Nostradamus, the more I realize how he gets Bono and Axl Rose to open up in his SPIN articles. He’s just so, well, normal.
“Well, especially in this book, the things I write are normative. Everyone has had relationships that didn’t work. Everyone’s had songs that they liked when they were 17 because of the context in which they heard them. Everyone’s been on a trip and met some stranger, and it’s like, ‘Oh, my worldview’s different,'” Klosterman notes.
“Well, I take these specific situations, and I basically use them to talk about culture as a whole. But really, the reason that I write so much first-person stuff and the reason that it is so seemingly egocentric, is that I use my life as a literary device. The reason I live and do things is to create these scenarios where I can write about bigger ideas.”
Hold up-he uses his life as a literary device?
“Well, the only really successful relationship I’ve ever had in my life is with writing,” Klosterman admits.
Killing Yourself to Live is arguably Klosterman’s most personal work, a memoir chronicling his late 20s. So what would it be like to be in a relationship with someone who uses their life as a springboard for story ideas?
“It is weird, like for the women in this book… I mean, I was in love with all of them, and I would hate for them to think that I used them,” Klosterman offers. “And I didn’t, because those relationships were real. But I write about things that are important to me, and they were important. So inadvertently, almost every experience I have has some impact on my writing.”
And so, of course, does pop culture. Klosterman has argued that pop culture influences us all both subliminally and consciously-so much so that films like Say Anything have us searching not for a person we can love, but actually for a character like Lloyd Dobbler. We’re continually looking for archetypes we aren’t even sure we want.
Klosterman himself admits that without Woody Allen, his sex life wouldn’t even have gotten off the ground. The author defines three female figures in his life by using songs, films, and movies. So I wanted to know-why do we keep letting pop culture screw us around?
“I might be an example of the question you’re asking,” Klosterman notes. “The fact that I’m describing these women, like they seem like this song or this combination, ultimately might be why the relationships in this book don’t work out. Because I’m not, at least in the context of the story, viewing them as people. I’m viewing them as elements of things I understand, hoping that by putting them in those terms I’ll understand them. And that never works.”
Klosterman may be struggling with life issues like the rest of us, but as a celebrated author, journalist, and columnist, he has some advice for young, aspiring writers.
“Basically, when you write, you worry about three things: try to be entertaining, try to be interesting, and try to be clear. Try to be interesting so that people will read what you’re writing and say, ‘Oh, that made me think about it.’ Try to be entertaining so that the experience of reading the piece is the same as listening to (the) music. And try to be clear so people know what the fuck you’re talking about. Everything else is secondary,” he says.
And even though he’s come a long way in his career, is that still what he tries to achieve?
He smiles.
“Those are the only three things I worry about.”
I shake his hand. I now know Chuck Klosterman. And I didn’t even pass out.
