Tiffanie DeBartolo

How to Kill a Rock Star by Tiffanie DeBartolo is a 2005 Sourcebooks Landmark publication.

While this novel explores many of my favorite things- like fate, loss, and love- and it is set against a rock music backdrop- which should have been right up my alley- the book didn’t hit the right notes for me.

The story follows Eliza, a journalist who wants to write about rock music. Her brother is in a rock band called Bananafish and it is through him that she meets Paul. Despite being complete opposites the two begin seeing each other- but things go awry when Paul does something Eliza thinks compromises his integrity as a musician.

I believe this book might have been inspired, at least in part, by the author’s relationship with musician, Jeff Buckley. It’s a sort of homage to music and touches on music as an art form, rather than a commodity- again all things that should have appealed to me-

But I was not a fan of the execution. The author does capture time and place very well, the secondary characters were well-drawn. Unfortunately, Eliza and Paul…. Not so much. I never warmed up to Paul and I just couldn’t muster up a connection to Eliza- despite my best efforts to do so. Putting these characters together as a romantic couple fell flat - zero chemistry. Then comes all the melodrama- which can work for me- but just didn’t go over well in this case.

Then came the ending. Boy, was I ticked. I can do ambiguous- in fact, I’m often a fan of that approach. Open endings can allow me to give the book the ending I want it to have- but in this case it was not a good look… at all.

Overall, I have enjoyed some of this author’s work in the past and will certainly be open to reading more of her work in the future- but this one was a miss all the way around.

1.5 stars… (meer)

“It was a story about people with dreams. Dreams that never come true,” is a line in God-Shaped Hole about a fictional book a character writes, but it could just as easily describe itself. Jacob and Beatrice, the central lovers in Tiffanie Debartolo’s God-Shaped Hole are “Siamese soul lovers”, as Jacob describes, and of course they are, because they’re made up and fictionally perfect for each other.

The characters are seemingly deep without having actual substance. One loves the particularly not insightful Pete Townsend line “no one respects the flame quite like the fool who’s badly burned”.

And yet, when we experience a deeply yearning love for the first time, don’t we feel this way? Like we are MEANT for this, and we say the stupidest things. Debartolo’s strength seems to be in converting a certain kind of indelible tragic emotion outside of the exact words she’s using. It remains on the surface, though. This is all rough draft writing. It needs a second pass, or a fifth pass, probably.

And yet, again. At the end, past the tragedy that permeates the novel, I feel those emotions and loss and sorrow. The characters are not much more than caricatures, but sometimes that’s enough to tap into the well of human emotions.

Lines I liked, for one reason or another:

- Was it claustrophobia of my apartment, or of the couple-hundred mile radius I helped populate?
- Where the fuck have you been all my life?
- Sometimes the most consequential moments in my life originate from a state of completely witless human auto-pilot.
- I usually prefer my company to any old idiot…
- …something about it made my heart hurt.
- …some people feel things too deeply.
- The contentment on his face said he found value in it, wasn’t plagued by it like I was.
- “It’s one of my favorite songs ever.” He stressed the ‘ever’ like it hurt.
- I felt a charge when he said that. Like he’d rubbed his stocking-feet on carpet and touched my cheek.
- Kids, dogs, and middle-aged divorcées like me.
- “Wait until we move to the Mississippi delta. Then you’ll get [William Faulkner].”
- I didn’t know how to act like a normal person and be in love at the same time.
- [The coyotes] sang back and forth, then together at the same time, like they were performing a tragic duet.
- It was mating season, and the [humpback whales] were singing to attract their lovers. I asked him why we could hear them but not see them. “They’re a thousand miles away.”
- “I like it. I like the suffering.”
- “People have reasons for what they do. And even if those reasons can’t be justified, that doesn’t make them bad people, just flawed. You have to remember someone or something has hurt them too.”
- “We were young, too young to be a family.”
- Reading is the best way to learn how to write.
- How many times in your life and you allowed to say “if only…?”
- I was never cut out to be a father.
- That kid’s got heart. It’s written all over his face. But it’ll be the death of him.
- A connection takes time.
- It drives me crazy when people know me well enough to remind me what I believe.
- You can’t put life on pause and then catch up with it later when you have more energy to give.
- It’s never the truth that changes.
- “I love you. You know that, right?”
- I missed my unforgettable friend.
… (meer)