Turn Down the Music and Read: Die Young With Me

I’m not going to lie. When my neighborhood book pusher Kathleen from A Great Good Place for Books slipped me an advance copy of Die Young With Me: A Memoir by musician Rob Rufus, about his battle with cancer as a teenager, right around the time my dad got diagnosed with the same disease, I stuck it on a bottom shelf. Not the reading I needed at the time. (Turns out, Agatha Christie, Prince, and Bowie were the perfect distraction, for weeks.)

But I finally had the wherewithal to pull it out this week, in advance of its September 20^th release, and am so glad I did. It’s not an easy read, and I imagine anyone who has undergone chemo or has had a child go through it may find the vivid descriptions particularly difficult. But that was exactly why I liked it: Rufus does a tremendous service in inviting the reader into a medical experience about which most of us have only the vaguest idea. Having read this, I feel like I’d be a better friend and support to anyone going through cancer treatment.

The musical hook: Rufus and his twin brother Nat grew up in the ‘90s in a small town in West Virginia. Like so many disaffected outsiders in similar settings, they turn to music for solace. In this case it’s punk, from Pennywise to the Ramones to Bad Religion to The Misfits. They teach themselves to play, form a band called Defiance of Authority with a couple of friends, and are on the verge of grabbing hold of the bottom rung of the ladder of musical success when Rob gets a cough he can’t shake.

As a parent, particularly as one whose child underwent surgery for a tumor that turned out to be benign, the scenes of Rob and his mom going back and forth for weeks to doctors who just kept prescribing more cough syrup were absolute agony. Remind me never to get sick in West Virginia. Every memoirist writes from his own vantage point, and no 17-year-old boy is going to be much clued in to his parent’s feelings anyway. But their devotion to Rob is written between every line, and I felt as dug in for his parents in this book as I did for their son.

Once the diagnosis is made, the whole book switches into high gear. Rob does not stint in sharing details of treatments, side effects, his emotional state as he tries desperately to hang on to the punk kid he was. Having a twin drives home the message of how a childhood illness can change a person: in Nat, Rob sees an everyday reminder of what he would look and act like if he were healthy. But between Nat, the other bandmates, his high school girlfriend, and his parents, there is a team to keep Rob tethered and fighting to surmount his illness. His love of punk music plays its part, giving Rob focus and goals, even if he has to tape the drumsticks to his hands when he is finally well enough to pick them up again.

Spoiler alert: Rufus didn’t die young (would have been harder to write the memoir if he had.) He and his brother now live in Nashville and tour as Blacklist Royals. After reading this book, and understanding what it took for him to take his seat behind the drumkit again, I’d be a fan even if I’d never heard a song.