Darius Rucker Says Writing Memoir Helped Him Heal from Deaths of Dad & Brother: 'Hadn't Dealt with Those Traumas' (Exclusive)

The country star's new memoir 'Life's Too Short' is out now

• Darius Rucker's memoir is out on Tuesday

• The country star and Hootie & the Blowfish frontman hopes Life's Too Short is like he and the reader "are sitting in a bar and I was telling you my story"

• Among the more personal aspects of Rucker’s story is the complicated relationships he had with his late father and his older brother

Darius Rucker’s been living out the contents of his new memoir Life’s Too Short for 58 years — but it took becoming an empty nester for him to feel comfortable sharing it with the world.

“You don’t want your kids to be going to high school hearing, ‘I read your dad’s book,’” he tells PEOPLE of his daughters Cary, 29, and Dani, 23, and son Jack, 19. “I knew I was going to tell the truth, and the truth [can] sometimes be out there. I just wanted them to be old enough to handle it.”

When he says he wanted to tell the truth, Rucker isn’t kidding. The book (out Tuesday, May 28) covers all aspects of the musician’s life, from his humble beginnings singing Al Green for his mother’s friends to the hard-partying peak of his Hootie & the Blowfish fame. It covers friendships with stars like Woody Harrelson and Tiger Woods, and also gives intimate insight into his fears and eventual accomplishments breaking into country music as a Black artist.

“I wanted it to be like we were sitting in a bar and I was telling you my story,” Rucker says. “I guess not a lot of people know a lot about me. They know my music and what I do. I hope my journey pleasantly surprises people.”

Among the more personal aspects of Rucker’s story is the complicated relationships he had with his late father Billy and his older brother Ricky.

Billy was largely absent during Rucker’s childhood, and Life’s Too Short covers several complex reunions they had over the years, including a phone call in which his father asked the star to give him $50,000.

The three-time Grammy winner says that when it came to his dad, “I always told myself I was fine.” But when he finally put pen to paper, it kickstarted a period of healing.

“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 says. “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.”

Related: Darius Rucker to Release New Memoir: 'Life's Too Short' (Exclusive)

Then there’s Ricky, Rucker’s older brother, who was in and out of jail during the star’s childhood amid substance abuse issues. Rucker has not spoken publicly about his sibling and says he was “surprised” by how much he wrote about Ricky, who died after falling and hitting his head amid a seizure while “f---ed up,” he writes in the book.

“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.”

Life’s Too Short covers Rucker’s own issues with substance abuse, especially during Hootie’s heyday (“I don’t think anybody went harder. We always think, ‘God, that all four of us came out the other end…'” he says of bandmates Dean Felber, Mark Bryan and Jim Sonefeld). But Rucker’s dabbles with hard drugs ended thanks to his ex-wife Beth, who gave him an ultimatum he now credits with saving his life.

“The one thing I hope came across in the book [was] she was a wonderful human being,” he says of Beth. “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.”

Related: Darius Rucker Praises His Three Kids in Hollywood Walk of Fame Speech: 'They're Everything to Me'

Elsewhere in the book, the “Wagon Wheel” singer — who released his latest album Carolyn’s Boy, named after his late mother, last October — talks about his crossover into country music and his thoughts on blazing a path for Black artists in the genre.

To PEOPLE, he praises stars who have walked through the door he kicked open, like Kane Brown and Shaboozey, as well as Beyoncé, who recently released the country album Cowboy Carter.

“She’s bringing eyes to the genre, eyes that would’ve never looked at the genre, so you got to love it. I think it’s awesome,” he says. “I love that record. I think it’s a great record.”

At its core, though, Rucker’s book is a humble ode to the people and places that made him who he is — and the fate that brought together a little band called Hootie & the Blowfish. The band is set to tour together this summer, and Rucker is also hard at work in the studio making a rock album with R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, former Black Crowes drummer Steve Gorman and Tom Bukovac.

“I’m trying to do the best I can, and people ask me all the time what I want on my tombstone,” he says. “I always say, ‘He was a nice guy.’ That’s how I really try to live my life.”

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