Revealing new Buck 65 book probes career, divorce – even if it’s not all true

TORONTO – In April, Rich Terfry authored a revealing Facebook post that prompted a range of reactions: concern, curiosity and anger. But he just felt relief.

He wrote then that he had “destroyed every important relationship in (his) life by cheating and lying,” including his marriage. The CBC radio host and artist otherwise known as Buck 65 went on for four apologetic, self-loathing paragraphs, pleading for help and insisting he wasn’t the person his fans thought he was.

He went on to delete the post, but he insists now that the confession wasn’t some impulsive, dark-night-of-the-soul mistake.

“Definitely not a great moment that I was in when I wrote it, but it wasn’t completely the product of the heat of the moment — ’cause I thought about it,” he said in Toronto this week.

“I have this thing that I’m ashamed of, and it just kind of keeps getting in the way. And it’s heavy, and I’m … tired of carrying it around.

“So I just put it out there,” he added. “‘I blew it. My marriage was my fault. I cheated on my wife, and I feel terrible about it. And I need help with this, and I just really want to be a better person.’

“The response was overwhelmingly positive. Not to say that there weren’t some negative consequences to it as well — that was hard for a few people to hear, I think.”

Why air his failings so publicly, then? Well, he explains, he didn’t want to give himself the option of lying about his past later.

“It was kind of bonkers,” he said, smiling slyly. “I can admit it.”

He actually considers the Facebook post and last year’s album “Neverlove” to be companion pieces — and with his new semi-memoir, “Wicked and Weird: The Amazing Tales of Buck 65,” he has closed the trilogy.

Out this week, the work of “autofiction” blurs reality with Terfry’s rich imagination, embellishing tales of his tumultuous upbringing in rural Nova Scotia, his flirtation with a professional baseball career, and his Radiohead-assisted ascent as an alt-hip-hop eccentric.

He figures the book contains roughly a 60:40 ratio of real-to-imagined material. While shocking anecdotes about Terfry’s being jailed in Russia or hugged by a nude Pamela Anderson after the 2006 Junos might defy belief, he says everything in the book contains a kernel of truth. (Of Anderson, he smiles: “I’m guessing she would remember the night like I remember it.”)

His mother is a far less frivolous subject. He writes that she was abusive, that she taught him to loathe himself and that “she hated (him) until the day she died.”

Since his mother’s death in 1999, Terfry has only publicly probed their relationship on the song “Ice” from 2001’s “Man Overboard.” Even privately, he hadn’t necessarily dug this deeply.

“The figure of my mom has always loomed large in my life,” he said. “This was the first time I really explored the whole thing. I just felt compelled to sort through all my stuff.”

Although he writes in detail about an earlier romance with French novelist Claire Berest — from whom he borrowed the autofiction format — he quite intentionally chose not to write about his marriage.

“I started writing this book and ‘Neverlove’ when my wife left, and so the idea is ‘Neverlove’ is sort of the aftermath — me dealing with my marriage falling apart — the book is everything that came before it,” he explained.

“I was trying to figure out: when and where did I become that person that blew this thing, that wrecked this marriage?”

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