Rory Feek Announces Upcoming Book, ‘This Life I Live’
Rory Feek has been showing Joey + Rory fans another side of himself over the course of the past few years with his blog, This Life I Live. Now he is set to tell the in-depth story of his life in a full-length autobiography of the same name.
Feek began his blog to document the process he and his wife and singing partner, Joey, were going through in deciding to simplify their lives. But it ended up turning into an agonizing, and yet ultimately uplifting step-by-step chronicle of Joey's battle with cancer, which ended in her death in March.
In a new blog entry announcing the book, Feek admits he has always wanted to write his life story, and even approached some publishers about it a few years back, only to be told that Joey + Rory were not famous enough to sustain sales. He says Joey always believed that he would be able to fulfill his dream one day, and shares the irony that her illness is what finally made the opportunity come around.
"The calls started coming in around December I think," he writes. "From publishers and agents who were aware of my blog and the story I was telling, and my wife was living. They saw something I guess: the prayers on Joey’s behalf, the Facebook numbers, the national press. A perfect storm. A husband with a voice, a wife with a story, and an audience who cared about them."
He says Joey felt vindicated when he told her the news.
"As I spoke, she was smiling again. Beaming actually. '…See, I told you so,' she said as she held my hand, 'you were born to do this.' My eyes began to well up with tears. She knew what I was thinking… 'I may have been born to do this… but why do you have to die to make it happen?' She just kept holding tight to my hand and smiling and saying, 'His will honey, not ours.' And so it is. I don’t understand it. But it is."
Feek hopes to tell the story of how his relationships with God and Joey changed him from someone he describes as "a man so lost, it’s a miracle that he was ever found," adding that it's a story "about doing unforgivable things, and still being forgiven. About the grace of God and the girl He used to change me and everyone around me forever."
But despite his faith and his pleasure at the chance to get to tell his story, it's still bittersweet for Feek.
"Hemingway once said, 'There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,'" he states. "And I believe that he was right. Except, for this book to happen… I did the first part, and Joey did the last."
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