Feeling THIS

In a full-hearted new memoir, Blink-182’S MARK HOPPUS confronts friendship breakups and a cancer diagnosis

- Daniela Tijerina

"I FEEL LIKE I'm supposed to be dead," says Mark Hoppus. "Every day after cancer is a gift."

It’s strange, if not bittersweet, to hear the 53-year-old vocalist, bassist, and founding member of the famously irreverent chart-topping, multiplatinum, Grammy-nominated band Blink-182 sounding more like a buttoned-up motivational speaker than the beloved pop-punk royalty that he is.

But his unruly salt-and-pepper hair and thick black-rimmed glasses act as a reminder that even this skater kid from the Southern California desert, whose music came to be emblematic of everlasting youth, somehow isn’t immune to growing up—or growing older.

“I fail a lot, and I still get mad at dumb shit, and I still get depressed sometimes, and sometimes I'll waste a whole day fucking looking at my phone and Instagram when I should be out looking at art and creating and doing fun stuff,” says Hoppus. “But I really, after cancer, have tried to cherish every day, every relationship. It’s made me reevaluate a lot.”

Getting to this point, as he recounts in his new memoir,