The author lost someone he loved. He then wrote a book about the soundtrack of their life together in a way that makes you feel like you, too, loved and lost. 
 Despite the obvious tear-your-heart-out sadness of it all, you still come away feeling like it was worth it, to have been given the chance to love and be loved. 
 Favorite Quotes 
 Without [Renee], I didn't want to do anything, except keep being good at Renee. 
 Out the window is a blur and all I can really hear is this girl's hair flapping in the wind, and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else. 
 I never planned to get married when I was only twenty-five, and I'm not sure exactly how it happened - neither of us ever officially proposed, or anything dramatic like that. It started off as a playful fantasy we talked about. Then the fantasy became a plan, the way fantasies sometimes do, and the plan became a future. It didn't hit us as the climax of anything, just the celebration of something that had already happened to us. I guess we hoped the celebration would help us understand what had happened. 
 Just more of that endless, useless knowledge you absorb when you're in a relationship, with no meaning or relevance outside of that relationship, with no meaning or relevance outside of that relationship. When the relationship's gone, you're stuck knowing all this garbage. 
 What do you do with kindness like that? I felt tiny beside it, and stupid for not understanding the first thing about it...It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing. 
 No doubt people could spot me a block away and know that I had lived past my till-death-do-you-part date.