Chuck Klosterman - Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

CHRISTOPHER MCLALLEN

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN is the author of Eating the Dinosaur; Down-town Owl; Chuck Klosterman IV; Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs; and Fargo Rock City . He is a featured columnist for Esquire , a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and has also written for Spin, The Washington Post, The Guardian, ESPN, and The Believer .

MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS

COVER DESIGN BY OFFICE OF PAUL SAHRE

COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY JASON FULFORD

Praise for Killing Yourself to Live

One of Americas top cultural critics.

Entertainment Weekly

As entertaining as it is unpredictable, as madcap as it is occasionally maddening. [Klosterman] is funny, sad, tormented, insightful, ludicrous, and occasionally precious in a way that is all his own. And his observations on American culture, pop and otherwise, are often trenchant and thought-provoking.

Joe Heim, The Washington Post

An affecting meditation on classic rock, mortality, and girls.

William Georgiades, New York Post

Klosterman is like the new Hunter S. Thompson. Only its as if Hunter were obsessed with KISS instead of Nixon.

Kyle Smith, People

Hes killing his artform, in hopes of reviving it.

Noel Murray, The Onion A.V. Club

Full of sharp observations and dry wit as well as clever musings on society and personal failings.

Eric Fidler, The Miami Herald

Reading Klosterman is like hanging out with your favorite drinking buddy in college and riffing all night on your pop culture obsessions.

Will Crain, San Francisco Chronicle

An amusing gazetteer of modern America.

Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times

Riveting and poignant, both side-splitting and stirring. Nobody understands identification through pop culture like Chuck Klosterman. Killing Yourself to Live is terribly funny, astute, canny and yet incredibly sensitive. I read it. Then read it again. Chuck Klosterman is a fucking genius.

NOW Magazine (Toronto)

A nice meditation on rock, living fast, dying young, and leaving a pretty corpse.

Chicago Tribune

With immense affability, [Klosterman] welcomes you into his world from the start. Its hard not be instantly won over. When you learn that Klosterman is proposing to take you with him on a 6,557-mile road trip across America, all you want to do is leap into the passenger seat, duffel bag in hand, and sing along to Horse with No Name on the car stereo. And what a trip it is. Even if your world is not exactly his world, its a pleasure to be along for the ride. Despite his morbid leanings, Chuck is helplessly, hilariously stuck in the land of the living.

The Guardian (UK)

Dude, better than another fucking Gang of Four reference.

The Village Voice

Thanks for the ride, Chuck. It was a pleasure.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune

No one can pull off that particular hybrid of Americana, rock n roll history, and stream-of-consciousness cultural commentary better than Chuck Klosterman: Call it Klostermania.

Radar

Though undoubtedly enthusiastic about rock n roll, Killing Yourself to Live maintains its integrity, and isnt afraid to knock over a few of musics sacred cows.

Time Out New York

Strangely compulsive The secret of good journalism, as Twain demonstrated, is tone. Get the tone right and the reporting falls into place. Killing Yourself to Live is an exquisite exercise in tonal control.

The Observer (London)

If you think about rock music way too much, this book is more fun than a weekends worth of VH1 specials. Its the literary equivalent of hanging out in a bar with good friends talking about dumb stuff, which is ultimately the only stuff that matters.

San Antonio Express-News

Filled with stunning, simple little snakebites of truth.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Klosterman [can] convincingly argue for enjoying Rod Stewart, KISS, and the Olive Garden. A Midwest native, he treats his late subjectswhich include Duane Allman and Sid Viciousoften with humor or exasperation, but no hipster snobbery.

The Boston Phoenix

Funny and often insightful youll definitely want to read him.

The Hartford Courant

An inspired postmodern travelogue.

Philadelphia City Paper

Although this sounds like a recipe for the worst kind of navel-gazing literature, Killing Yourself to Live is, in fact, hilarious.

The Tampa Tribune

Thank God Chuck lives the life he does and writes the way he writes about it. Its not just autobiography; its a vital form of truth, and hes the real thing.

Douglas Coupland

I cant think of a more sheerly likable writer than Chuck Klosterman and his old-fashioned, all-American voice: big-hearted and direct, bright and unironic, optimistic and amiable, self-deprecating and reassuringwith a captivating lack of fuss or pretension. Hes also genuinely funny and I pretty much agree with everything he says.

Bret Easton Ellis

Also by Chuck Klosterman

Fargo Rock City:

A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nrth Dakta

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs:

A Low Culture Manifesto

Chuck Klosterman IV:

A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

Downtown Owl:

A Novel

SCRIBNER

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

The names and other identifying characteristics of some people in this book have been changed.

Copyright 2005 by Chuck Klosterman

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

The excerpt from Chuck Klosterman IV , Bending Spoons with Britney Spears, first appeared in the November 2003 issue of Esquire .

First Scribner trade paperback edition 2006

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Text set in Bodoni

Library of Congress Control Number: 2005042498

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-6445-7

ISBN-10: 0-7432-6445-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-6446-4 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-7432-6446-0 (Pbk)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7448-7 (ebook)

Thank you for purchasing this Scribner eBook.

Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Scribner and Simon & Schuster.

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

This is a story about love, death, driving, narcissism, America, the ill-advised glamorization of recreational drug use, not having sex, eating breadsticks at Olive Garden, talking to strangers, feeling nostalgic for the extremely recent past, movies youve never seen, KISS, Radiohead, Rod Stewart, andto a lesser extentprehistoric elephants of the Midwestern plains. If these are not things that interest you, do not read this book.

The journalism in this book is, to the best of my abilities, completely accurate. The stuff about my personal life is merely the way I remember it, as I do not tape-record every conversation I have on a day-to-day basis. There is also some minor manipulation of time, and one sequence near the end of the book actually happened in New Zealand.