Thanks to his new memoir Life's Too Short, Darius Rucker is opening up about past traumas. In particular, the singer said that losing his father and older brother affected him.
Rucker had a complex and sometimes troubled relationship with both. Absent for most of his childhood, his father Billy once asked him for $50,000 over the phone. When his father died, Rucker buried his emotions. He said to People, "I always told myself I was fine." However, he later realized this wasn't true.
"When I did write about it, I started thinking about, 'Wow, that really affected me a lot more than I thought it did.' Even when I did the audiobook, there were some times where I caught myself holding back tears. Reading those things that affected me so much, but I just pretended they didn't," he said. "It was very therapeutic for me. It helped me. My therapist got a lot of work for me writing that book. It brought up a lot of stuff that I wanted to deal with. Because I hadn't dealt with those traumas, I just let them go. And now I get to deal with them because I wrote that book, and I think about them."
Darius Rucker Talks About Brother's Death
As for his brother Ricky, Rucker said his older brother was in and out of jail for most of his life. He also had substance abuse issues. Rucker realized that his death hit him hard.
"I knew he affected me, because once I went away to college, I was never coming home because of him. I just didn't want to be around him," Rucker says. "I always said if I wrote the book, I was going to tell the truth. And I told the truth about him. That was another thing that you have to deal with, that trauma. Watching your older brother with all this potential turn into that was tough. It was traumatic."
Rucker also hasn't been afraid to hold the mirror up to his own shortcomings and struggles with substance abuse. Rucker said he stepped away from hard drugs after his ex-wife Beth made him.
"The one thing I hope came across in the book [was] she was a wonderful human being," he said. "She did everything she could to keep our family together, and I did everything I could to not. And she saved my life. I think if she hadn't put her foot down like that... I'd probably be dead right now. So that moment was a big moment, and a great moment in my life."
