Everyone Loves You When You're Dead Book Review: No Audiobook, and Why

There is no audiobook of Everyone Loves You When You're Dead, abridged or unabridged. If that is what brought you here, that is your answer. The book itself is five hundred pages of music-journalism interviews cut into fragments, it holds together the way an archive holds together rather than the way a book usually does, and I have it at 4.25.

I read it in three sittings spread across about two months. Once on a plane travelling for work, once on a long car ride, and then I finished it over a weekend.

That is not a criticism and it is the most useful thing I can tell you about it. There was nothing I missed by not reading it all at once. The book is built to be picked up and put down, and it does not punish you for the gap.

What is the book actually?

Years of music journalism interviews, cut into fragments and arranged. No narrative, no argument, no through line. Mini stories about people I grew up watching on television.

The first edition sets them out as a preamble and ten named "Acts", with titles like "Act one, or The worst interview ever" and "Act two, or Flying saucers, zombie slaves, and autopsies on the third stage", and it ends with an index. Both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus describe the same effect from the outside: an interview gets introduced, dropped, and picked back up much later.

Does it hold together as a book?

It holds together the way a good archive holds together, which is not the way a book usually does.

You are not building toward anything and nothing pays off later. What you get instead is access. This is Strauss writing closest to his Rolling Stone period, and it shows. It genuinely felt like being behind the camera, or backstage, or in the hotel room with these people.

The closest thing I can compare it to is reality television, except I was reading it, and it landed before reality TV meant what it means now. That is what the book is actually delivering: unguarded proximity to famous people, captured by someone who was in the room.

One warning from someone who did not get on with the method as easily. Kitty Empire, reviewing it in the Observer, wrote that "the conceit clunks a little at first" before saying the reader acclimatises, and she faults the transitions for not giving you dates, times and contexts to hold on to. If you like knowing where you are, the opening will cost you something.

What stayed with me

The section on Slash. Out of five hundred pages of fragments, that is the one that comes back.

What is the 4.25 scoring?

Not prose in the way the number would on a novel, because most of the memorable words in this book belong to other people.

What it is scoring is the access and what he does with it. Getting these people to talk like this is the skill, and arranging the results so that a fragment lands without any setup around it is the other half of it.

I am not alone on that. Kirkus called it "gonzo interviewing at its best", Publishers Weekly singled out the way he cuts between encounters, and Hot Press called him one of the most intuitive interviewers. The interviewing is the thing.

Why is there no audiobook, and what should you do instead?

There isn't one. Not abridged, not unabridged.

I might have listened to it if it existed. But the stories are so disjointed that I am not sure an audiobook would have worked. This is a book with no momentum to carry a listener through, built for dipping and skipping, and both of those are things the page does well and audio does badly.

There is a practical version of that too. The book ends with an index, and an index is the thing that makes dipping possible. You can go and find the Slash section again. On a recording you would have to hunt for it.

So, if you came here looking for the audiobook: it does not exist, and I do not think you are missing much. Read it in pieces instead, which is how it wants to be read anyway.

One thing that can mislead you while searching: Strauss has read excerpts from it on the radio. That is an author reading aloud, not an audiobook edition, and no storefront sells one.

What should you know before you start?

The interviews cover drug use and addiction, sexual content and sexual language, strong profanity and scatological humour, and weapons, criminality, threats and incarceration. There is a sustained account of the decline and death of the critic Paul Nelson, and the book carries the ordinary weight of grief and mental-health distress that comes with that. At least one interview subject makes a racist statement, reported as said.

No publisher or author-approved content note exists for this title. Those topics come from named critics and from Strauss's own description of the book, so treat them as guidance drawn from the record rather than an official list. I am naming the topics and not where they sit.

Who should read it, and who should skip it?

Read it if you grew up on these people and want to see them with the performance off. The appeal is proximity, not analysis, and if that sounds good it is very good.

Skip it if you need a book to be going somewhere. There is no spine here and no amount of patience will produce one. Five hundred pages of fragments is a real ask if fragments are not what you want.

Common questions

Is there an audiobook of Everyone Loves You When You're Dead? No licensed English audiobook was found on any major storefront, in publisher metadata, or in library catalogues, and no narrator or runtime exists to report. That is an absence of confirmation rather than proof one has never been made anywhere, but for a buyer today it amounts to the same thing.

Do I need to read it in order? No, and that is the most useful thing about it. It is arranged in ten acts with an index, interviews recur rather than resolve, and nothing later depends on your having read what came before.

Is this the same book as the one with the different subtitle? Yes. The US edition is subtitled Journeys into Fame and Madness and the UK Canongate edition is (And Other Things I Learned From Famous People). Same book, and they look like two on a listing page.

How long is it? Depends who you ask, which is normal for a book this old with this many editions. The current Dey Street paperback prints 544 pages; other catalogue records for related editions say 507, 517 and 560.