Feeling THIS

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

Daniela Tijerina

Vanities / Books

"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, Fahrenheit-182 (Dey Street), co-written with Dan Ozzi, has been a journey. Over the past 30 years, Hoppus and his bandmates and longtime best friends, Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker, have been put through the ringer. For three dudes known for getting naked in music videos and making dick jokes onstage, Blink has endured their fair share of traumatic events, from Barker's near-fatal plane crash in 2008 and their producer and dear friend Jerry Finn's death from a brain hemorrhage that same year, to DeLonge's exit from the band in 2015 and, most recently, Hoppus's cancer diagnosis. By rock star standards, the fact that Hoppus lived to tell the tale is a miracle in and of itself. But, as Hoppus writes, "one in a million" happens to him a lot—for better or worse.

The band's history starts when DeLonge and Hoppus meet in San Diego in 1992. "I loved Tom from the first day I met him," Hoppus writes. But it wasn't until after Barker came on board that they exploded onto the scene with their 1999 breakthrough album, Enema of the State, delivering coming-of-age anthems like "What's My Age Again?" and "All the Small Things" and becoming fixtures of the Billboard Hot 100 and MTV. Over the next decade and a half, the trio made three more studio albums, toured the world headlining venues like Madison Square Garden, and even landed the cover of Rolling Stone.

They were bona fide rock stars.

So when DeLonge quit the band to pursue his own musical endeavors (and research UFOs), Hoppus was devastated. In the book he likens the split to a divorce: "bitter and acrimonious." It brought him right back to his childhood and the feeling of a family being torn apart. "Everything was taken away from me, but I didn't want to make Tom [out] to be a bad person, because he is not. It was just where he was in life." It's a particularly sensitive subject for Hoppus, but "trying to write it so that I was fair to Tom," he says, made him "come to peace with a lot of anger and resentment."

His stage IV-A diffuse large B-cell lymphoma diagnosis, an aggressive form of blood cancer, arrived during the COVID-19 pandemic just as he was about to enter his first session with a new therapist. He writes that the experience was heightened by his preexisting anxiety, depression, and obsessive compulsions, describing candidly the panic attacks and suicidal ideations he experienced during the pandemic. "When I was diagnosed with cancer, everything else stopped," he says. "I thought I was going to die." There were those one-in-a-million odds again, he thought.

But the odds shifted in his favor. First, after learning about his diagnosis, DeLonge and Barker visited Hoppus at his house. It was as if no time had passed. No mention of the past, only the future, one where Hoppus was healthy and Blink would "make the best album of our lives," Hoppus recalls DeLonge saying. ("They're my best friends in the world," Hoppus says.) After six rounds of chemotherapy, which he details in raw journal excerpts, he was declared in remission in September 2021, and the next year they re-formed the band for an 18-month trial period. Then they released One More Time, their most mature album to date, featuring poignant lyrics like "it shouldn't take a sickness or airplanes falling out the sky / Do I have to die to hear you miss me?" Three years later, with one deluxe album and world tour down, they're still going strong. As Hoppus declares in the book, "Blink-182, forever and always."