“Punk said everything I felt inside and I wanted in.”

How can you not have a soft spot for a Canadian icon? I still remember when Fat Lip came out and listening to it on the windows media player, yes the one with the visuals, and being excited and thinking “hey, this band sounds pretty cool.” Now full honesty, after their first album my personal music taste evolved and I stayed away from a lot of radio rotations so I don’t have the full Sum 41 discography in my memory vault. 

Deryck goes over his whole life up to now in this one. Him having to move a lot as a kid because he had a single mom who had him while she was in highschool. The weird years of highschool where he met his fellow bandmates and started to really carve out his identity. The early years of the band and how they had to scrap their way to getting signed. The hard knocks of your life, especially when his body was failing him. The rock bottom of his addiction and so much more.

“I have a face people want to punch.”

Deryck lays a lot out in this memoir and inevitably while he had some really great moments he was also subjected to abuse and some really bad people. It takes a lot of courage for anyone to come forward and open old wounds and talk about the abuse they went through and my heart breaks for the sixteen year Deryck. 

While I really enjoyed this memoir it does have a bit of odd pacing, some stories he gets really down into the dirt with. Others where you expect some more depth are almost treated like a flippant anecdote. I will say while the pacing was a bit weird for me, the ability to talk about the really dark stories and toss in some humour and levity in other areas, really resonated with me. Trauma babies unite here. We might be damaged but we sure as hell are pretty funny. 

Overall it was a solid audiobook where you feel like you’re just sitting down and shooting the shit with a really likeable dude, even if he has a face you want to punch.