Everyone Loves You When You're Dead Review: The One With No Audiobook

Five hundred pages of interview fragments from Strauss's years as a music journalist, and I scored the writing 4.5. There is no audiobook of it at all in the catalogue I checked, which is a strange absence for a book made almost entirely of people talking. If you want this one, you read it.

What the book is

Between the late nineties and the late two-thousands Strauss interviewed an enormous number of famous people for Rolling Stone and the New York Times, and Everyone Loves You When You're Dead is the offcuts: the moments in those encounters that were too strange, too revealing or too awkward to survive a magazine edit.

It is not shaped as an argument, which is what separates it from his other three. There is no thesis and no arc. It is a five-hundred-page assembly of moments, arranged so that they rub against each other, and it holds together on the strength of the individual fragments rather than on where it is going.

That is also the honest caveat: a book with no spine is a book you can put down anywhere, and some readers never pick it back up.

There is no audiobook

Checked on 2026-08-26 against his Audible author page and the retail catalogue: no audiobook edition of this title appeared. Neither did Rules of the Game.

⚠️ That is not proof no recording has ever existed anywhere. It does mean a listener cannot currently buy one.

It is a genuinely odd gap. This is the most obviously performable thing he has written: hundreds of separate voices, most of them famous, most of them saying something short and strange. It is close to a readymade full-cast production, and the one Strauss book that did get a cast was The Truth, which is a memoir. If any of his books were going to be handed to nine actors, a reasonable person would have guessed this one.

So, the format recommendation writes itself. Print, because there is nothing else.

The edition

Who it is not for

Anyone who wants the argument. His other three are all one long dispute with himself; this is the notebook, and readers arriving for the thesis have found it shapeless.

Anyone who does not care about the people in it. The fragments carry the book, so if the names mean nothing to you the book has less to do.

Where it sits among his four is on the Neil Strauss author spotlight.