While celebrity memoirs can provide fans with surprising stories and endless entertainment, it’s also an opportunity for celebrities to come clean and open themselves up to the world. Whether it’s to talk about their relationships, their private feuds with co-stars, and more, it’s a celebrity’s rare opportunity to lay it all out on the table.
Most recently, stepping up to the challenge is country singer Darius Rucker. His memoir, titled Life’s Too Short, will tell his “remarkable story” – including a harrowing near-death experience.
In the first chapter, Rucker remembered his experience swimming with his friend and A-lister Woody Harrelson in Hawaii, per Us Weekly.
“At Woody’s, if you want to go swimming, you don’t simply slip on your trunks and dive into the pool,” Rucker said. “Way more complicated than that. We begin our swim by climbing down a jagged cliff — very slowly and carefully, inch by inch.” Per Rucker, getting down to the water included a “treacherous 25-minute descent.”
But while the journey was complicated already, Rucker’s struggles only continued in the water. “I’m better than a decent swimmer. I’m a strong, confident swimmer,” he said. But, despite his confidence, the “Wagon Wheel” singer was eventually pulled under by a rip current.
“The current is ferocious,” he remembered. “I feel as if some horrific giant squid has lashed itself around my body, circling and tightening its tentacles around my legs, dragging me under the water. I gulp and I gasp and I keep fighting.”
And while Rucker continued fighting, the current seemed stronger than him.
“I fight and flail for I have no idea how long — ten minutes, fifteen — and then I hear a voice,” Rucker recalled. “Woody. I can’t see him, but I hear him. He’s not far.”
As he’s taken ashore by the White House Plumbers star, Rucker said he remembers seeing “a blinding blast of white” and visions of his late mother. “The words leak out of my mouth, one at a time, each syllable a tiny jab of air,” Bucker said. “I blow out a final burst of words. ‘This is it.'”
The rest of the incident is almost a blur for the singer. “All I know for sure is that somehow Woody pulls me out of the current and he and [my other friend] Kirk drag me back to the beach because here I am, twenty-five years later,” he shared.
Knowing how terrifying that experience must have been, we’re not only glad he’s alive but also sharing his stories with the world. We can’t wait to read more!
Before you go, click here to see all the best celebrity memoirs you can read right now.
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