Rory Feek to Remember Late Wife Joey in Upcoming Memoir: 'She Changed Everything in My Life'

This Life I Live, out on Feb. 14, will also touch upon his dark past before they met

Photo: Courtesy Joey Feek

Rory Feek will continue to tell his moving story in a new memoir.

The country singer and his wife Joey rose to national fame documenting their family’s journey and Joey’s battle with cervical cancer – which she succumbed to in March – on their popular blog, This Life I Live. Now, Rory, 51, will open up further in his debut memoir of the same title, due on Valentine’s Day next year from HarperCollins imprint Thomas Nelson, he announced on the Feek’s site last week.

Rory accepted the offer in February, before his wife’s death, and received her blessing to share their story.

“She was smiling again. Beaming actually. ‘See, I told you so,’ she said as she held my hand, ‘you were born to do this.,'” Rory wrote in the blog post. “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?'”

In the book, Rory will write about his dark past and “hitting rock bottom” before he met his wife and turned to the Christian faith.

“It is a book about a man so lost, it’s a miracle that he was ever found. 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,” Rory added.

That girl who changed him was, of course, Joey. The pair married in 2002, just two months after they met. Both musicians, they began performing as the country duo Joey + Rory after taking third place on the CMT singing competition Can You Duet in 2008, with their career culminating in a Grammy nomination this year for their hit “If I Needed You.” Already a father to two adult daughters, Rory welcomed a third daughter, Indiana, with Joey in February 2014.

“Mine is a story about going from being a nobody, to being somebody’s… Joey’s. And how she changed everything in my life, and how she’s still doing it, even now,” wrote Rory, who penned the book in “our big brown recliner … the same one that she rocked our baby in and again slept in when she was too weak to make the long walk from our bedroom to the bathroom” of their Pottsville, Tennessee, farmhouse.

Rory’s book is just the latest way he plans to memorialize his wife, who was 40 when she died. Last month, he announced he will release a documentary, To Joey, With Love, produced from home video clips from their life with their daughter, up until Joey’s death.