Rolling Stone‘s sharpest wit remembers his wife, one mixtape at a time.
Even if you only knew Renee Crist as the byline on the sharpest capsules in the back of the legendary Option magazine, her death, at age 31, came as a punch in the gut. Even in the space of a few hundred words, she could convey a ferocious sense of life, one extinguished far too soon. In his musical memoir, Rob Sheffield, who married Crist in 1991 and buried her in 1997, thinks back on their joyous, tumultuous and tragically truncated relationship through their mutual love of music.

A staff writer for Rolling Stone and frequent VH1 talking head, Sheffield reflexively passes his experiences through the prism of pop culture, and his knee-jerk reference-dropping occasionally grows tiresome, especially when the subject strays from his relationship with Crist into superfluous asides. What passes, just barely, for sardonic deadpan on the page sounds more like glib irony when Sheffield reads it aloud in the sibilant monotone of a college-radio DJ.

Still, the heart of the book is Sheffield’s heartfelt tribute to a woman he loved, and there it’s impossible to imagine anyone else behind the mic. His voice brightens as he bullet-points the subjects of their recurring marital spats, and its pitch drops noticeably as he recounts the shell-shocked months after her death, when he spent his days reading in an Applebee’s so he could be sure not to run into any of their friends. In its headiest passages, Mix Tape is an inspired fusion of criticism and autobiography, as when Sheffield rereads Nirvana’s In Utero not as a preemptive suicide note, but as the testament of a young husband awed and somewhat terrified by his all-consuming love for his wife. Sheffield might have borrowed a title from Cobain’s widow for his strangely inspiring account of his own ordeal: Live Through This.