A Book That Changed My Life
An essay I wrote for the Drunken Odyssey Podcast. Listen here.
In the middle of a rant about the five worst break-ups he’s endured in his life, Rob Fleming, Nick Hornby’s reliably morose music junkie and narrator of High Fidelity asks a question:
“What came first—the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?”
It’s a question that I can’t help but think of when I think about High Fidelity, a book that, throughout college and into my twenties, has given me my own secret language with which to use to describe my own “heartbreak, rejection, misery and loss.”
Fleming (or Gordon for movie watchers) is my avatar. We listen to a lot of the same music, love the same movies and we both date lawyers. If he were real, we’d probably get along great, based on his own criteria for friendship: it’s not what you are like, but what you like, that matters most.
I’ve internalized the book so much that quoting it, or looking at the world through Fleming’s gloomy-colored glasses is practically reflexive at this point. I’m afraid that someday I’ll be found out, some girl will Google something I say, and know that these lines are Hornby’s, not mine.
But did High Fidelity just give me the words to explain this glass half-empty worldview? Was I like this all along? Or did I become like this after reading it? Am I a sad bastard because I love High Fidelity? Or do I love High Fidelity because I’m a sad bastard?
Throughout the novel, Fleming performs an autopsy on his most recent break-up, and examines his past failed relationships with the hope that it’ll guide him, and his ex-girlfriend Laura, back together. He’s a great narrator, but he’s not a great role model. He’s moody, unable to live in the moment, and his coping mechanisms occasionally border on illegality.
It all feels eerily similar to my life. I’ve thought those things, I’ve said (some) of those things. But I’ve never stood outside an ex’s window, calling her several dozen times from a payphone. But that’s really only because people don’t use payphones anymore.
He’s got a lot of reasons for why things don’t work, but few focus on Rob himself, which is something 28-year old me can see way more clearly now than 18-year old me did. The fact that his petulance and irritability works in winning Laura back overshadows the very real problem that he had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, toward adulthood and true empathy for those other women.
Rob does change, eventually. And the fact that he does, means there’s hope for the rest of us sad bastards out there. Me included. That’s why High Fidelity is such a hopeful book. Not because Rob wins, but because maybe sometime in the future, long after I figure out my own shit, I might win, too.
The purpose of good art, like really really good art, is to make us feel less alone. That’s why when things are bleakest, when I’m feeling my most heartbroken, desperate or afraid, I turn to this book. Because something happens when I flip through the pages, much like the same effect that listening to the Beatles—a band that’s all his own and un-tethered to any doomed romance—does for Fleming. I’ll feel a lot of things, and not one of them will be bad.
