Amanda Kloots Captures Nick Cordero's Legacy in "Live Your Life"

The opening line to Nick Cordero’s song, Live Your Life, for which Amanda Kloots’ best-seller is named, describes the book itself perfectly: “This hurts like hell, but it feels right.” Indeed, Live Your Life is filled with pain, but Kloots could not have executed the story more perfectly. It just feels right. The book was penned by Amanda, but it’s Nick’s story that she tells, interwoven with the stories of herself, their son, Elvis, and countless other family members and friends, their lives all inextricably intertwined with Nick’s. Throughout Live Your Life, Kloots makes it clear exactly how many lives Nick touched in his short time on Earth, and provides the opportunity for his story to touch many more lives in the future.

Nick’s story is a painful one, but the reader knows that going in. The unhappy ending is inevitable— it is right in the title, after all— but with Amanda’s unrelenting, practically patented brand of positivity seeping into every passage, you find yourself hoping, albeit futilely, for Nick to pull through.

Amanda tells the story of her husband’s illness and eventual passing beautifully, often sharing a moment from his time in the hospital alongside an anecdotal parallel from their pre-COVID lives together. So many around the world got to know Nick only after his diagnosis, when he was already hospitalized. So many never knew about the dreams he had and the life he lived. But he was more than a tragic COVID case, and with Live Your Life, Amanda is ensuring that the world will remember him not as his disease, but as the man and father he truly was.

The picture of Nick Cordero that Kloots paints is one of a man full of life, with a unique and fun personality. A man who, at age 41, still had so much living to do; so many aspirations and dreams to fulfill. Perhaps one of the most touching, yet heartbreaking parts of Live Your Life is knowing that Amanda helped her husband finally accomplish so many of those dreams. She helped him become a household name. A true rockstar.

Listening to the audiobook, the reader can hear firsthand how painful Nick's 95-day hospital stay was for Amanda and can fully understand how deep her grief runs even to this day. Her heartbreak is, and always will be, part of her day-to-day life, Amanda explains. But the pain in her narration is clear and requires no explanation or justification. At times, Amanda sobs her way through entire passages, clearly agonized over her memories of saying goodbye to Nick but persevering regardless. She knew it was important to tell his story and that she had to be the one to tell it. Her strength and seemingly never ending reserves of positivity are inspirational and often difficult to comprehend.

If you find yourself irrationally rooting for Nick to survive despite knowing his story, you are not alone, but you also won’t get the happy ending you were hoping for. But that’s not to say the story doesn’t have, at the very least, many positive takeaways. Kloots is all about positivity— it’s her brand, you might say, and it’s why so many immediately took to her story. Her bright attitude, sparkling personality, and clear authenticity were undeniable. She was a shining light in such a difficult time, and she unintentionally became the face for countless patients and families who were suffering from COVID at the same time as her husband. Kloots always focuses on the positive, even in the darkest times, and that positivity is what she leaves her readers with. While it's not necessarily a happy ending, we can tentatively label it a potential beginning.

Nick’s life did not end in his hospital room because Live Your Life secures a place for him in history. It solidifies his legacy as a rockstar, a Broadway showman, a fighter, and most importantly, a wonderful and loving father and husband. And that, it seems, is really what Amanda was hoping for all along.