Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

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Simon and Schuster, Jul 19, 2005 - Social Science - 256 pages
Building on the national bestselling success of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, preeminent pop culture writer Chuck Klosterman unleashes his best book yet—the story of his cross-country tour of sites where rock stars have died and his search for love, excitement, and the meaning of death.

For 6,557 miles, Chuck Klosterman thought about dying. He drove a rental car from New York to Rhode Island to Georgia to Mississippi to Iowa to Minneapolis to Fargo to Seattle, and he chased death and rock ‘n’ roll all the way. Within the span of twenty-one days, Chuck had three relationships end—one by choice, one by chance, and one by exhaustion. He snorted cocaine in a graveyard. He walked a half-mile through a bean field. A man in Dickinson, North Dakota, explained to him why we have fewer windmills than we used to. He listened to the KISS solo albums and the Rod Stewart box set. At one point, poisonous snakes became involved. The road is hard. From the Chelsea Hotel to the swampland where Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane went down to the site where Kurt Cobain blew his head off, Chuck explored every brand of rock star demise. He wanted to know why the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing...and what this means for the rest of us.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
11
Section 3
17
Section 4
23
Section 5
33
Section 6
49
Section 7
55
Section 8
75
Section 12
129
Section 13
141
Section 14
151
Section 15
165
Section 16
177
Section 17
195
Section 18
211
Section 19
221

Section 9
93
Section 10
103
Section 11
115
Section 20
229
Section 21
237
Copyright

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Page 11 - Though we did not know where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do, it seemed crucial that I spend a long time getting there; this would constitute the "epicness.

About the author (2005)

Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of many books of nonfiction (including The Nineties, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I Wear the Black Hat, and But What If We're Wrong?) and fiction (Downtown Owl, The Visible Man, and Raised in Captivity). He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Guardian, The Believer, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons.

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