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Love, love, love. All together now.

"All you need is love." "Love hurts." "Love is a many splendored thing." "Love is a dog from hell." The clichés and jabberwocky of love spill forth from even the most skeptical poets. We always buy into the experience because, like age and death, it's the one damned thing that nearly everyone will suffer in our lifetimes. It's never easy.

The trouble is that you never know what love is going to look like until it's too late.

Will the great love of your life be a soap opera or a tragedy, a secret or a deathly silence, a romantic comedy or a profound heartbreak? We never know until it hits us like a ton of bricks.

For Rolling Stone scribe Rob Sheffield, love was reduced to a box of dusty cassette tapes, a passion requited but nevertheless unfulfilled, and the ghost of "a real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl." Love, in his fractured world, is delivered with unflinching honesty through an uneven but unusually satisfying concoction of equal parts nostalgia, profound sorrow, terrible insight and the haunting meaning buried in half-forgotten tunes from the alternative era.

Love is a Mix Tape tells the story of the young journalist's seven-year relationship with Renée Crist, a gifted writer and effervescent music lover who shared his passion for fundamentally cool artists like Big Star, Leonard Cohen or Dusty Springfield as well as fresh new sounds from punky kids in bands like Pavement, The Pooh Sticks, and The Meat Puppets.

I've been accused of inconsiderately revealing the bitter twist of Love is a Mix Tape so if you're one of those thin-skinned readers who can't grasp that something bad is going to happen here, stop reading right now and go buy the book. If you're coming along, better slip on a Rolling Stones b-side or a Johnny Thunders solo record, partake of whatever substance eases your load, and we'll continue. This is going to hurt some.

It's no secret from the haunting tone that hangs over its introduction, as Sheffield the writer listens to a murky compilation of deep cuts from Morrissey and The Smiths over a cup of coffee in his Brooklyn apartment, that Renée is no longer with us. By page 14, he clues us in, with chilling composure, to the bomb dropped on his life: "We met on September 17, 1989. We got married on July 13, 1991. We were married for five years and ten months. Renée died on May 11, 1997, very suddenly and unexpectedly, at home with me, of a pulmonary embolism. She was thirty-one. She's buried in Pulaski County, Virginia, on the side of a hill, next to the Wal-Mart."

As a chronicler of pop culture zeitgeist for Rolling Stone and MTV, Sheffield can be a cocksure annoyance during his day gig. But in serving up his thoughtful tribute to his lost love, he manages to strike the right balance between rose-colored recollection, pointed pop commentary and cheerless melancholy, walking the line between extremes with a steady, relatively straightforward sincerity. Sure, there are plenty of questionable serendipities for the two young writers - they both happen to freelance for the two biggest music magazines in the country, Spin and Rolling Stone, as they juggle graduate degrees, teaching gigs, and live gigs - but it's his version of events and I'm willing to let go those few sticking points for the sake of the more interesting emotional terrain within.

It's important to note that Love is a Mix Tape is simply a memoir, no more but also no less. It's not by any means a biography of either husband or wife but a recollection of their time together, filtered through the music that she loved and the music she never lived to hear. It has a lot of great music, bad music, fun music and evocative music, all referenced with loving meticulousness by a writer who lives and breathes songs for a living. A track listing for a mix tape leads each chapter, delving deep to highlight tracks by Pavement, The Replacements, The Chills, R.E.M., Liz Phair and other alternative darlings but also admitting the sheer guilty pleasures of George Michael, Right Said Fred, Fine Young Cannibals and Tone Loc.

Although Sheffield certainly warms to the memories of those few years in the early 1990s, he doesn't succumb to the tragic melodrama that infects many memoirs of the James Frey ilk or descend into egotistical self-absorption like Neal Pollack's unreadable post-post-punk car crash, Alternadad. He describes the period with telling details as grunge rises from the garage and falls with Kurt Cobain's suicide, portraying the pre-Internet world with a certain snarky charm: "Note: the 'record store' was a popular retail strategy in the 1990s, a building where people would 'go' to 'buy' 'music,'" Sheffield writes.

Where Crist emerges in the book is in its snapshots of her: arguing with her husband over which of them is Hall and which is Oates, making up her own lyrics to "Heart-Shaped Box," hissing at Rob not to bruise her bourbon. There's love in those split seconds: "Renée was my hero. Have you ever had a hero? Someone who says, I think it would be a good idea for you to steal a car and set it on fire and drive it off a cliff, and you say, Automatic or standard? That's what Renée was. A lion-hearted take-charge southern gal," he writes. Even though Sheffield's carefully chosen words are tinged with 20/20 hindsight, anyone can see that his girl would have been somebody special to know.