Bruce Springsteen’s new, best-selling memoir is already drawing praise for its unflinching look at the demons that drove the famous rocker to success and how he still battles depression to this day.

For Palm Beach County readers, however, one of the most poignant aspects of “Born To Run” will come deep in the 510-page book, when Springsteen writes about the final days of The Big Man — E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons — and his death in June 2011 at St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach.

Springsteen and Clemons are intertwined in rock legend, because of their classic pose on the “Born To Run” album cover and their magical interplay in concert, as well as the soulful sound Clemons brought to Springsteen’s music. But as Springsteen mentions in the book, Clemons was a complex man, chasing his own demons for years until he finally found peace with last wife Victoria, and life off the road in a light-filled Singer Island condominium.

In the book, Springsteen says Clemons was dogged by increasing health problems. He got his first hint that something might be seriously wrong when Clemons asked to postpone a recording session to return to Florida and consult with a neurologist about a worrisome numbness in his hand. Springsteen and his wife Patti Scialfa went on an anniversary vacation to Paris, where they were awakened by a teary-eyed assistant telling them Clemons had suffered a stroke.

Springsteen immediately flew to West Palm Beach (he owns property in Wellington and wrote part of this memoir there), and went to Clemons’ side. He learned the “massive” stroke had happened as Clemons fell out of bed at home.

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Clarence Clemons with his wife Victoria Clemons inside their Singer Island condominium in 2009. (Brandon Kruse/The Palm Beach Post)

St. Mary’s personnel were “kind enough,” Springsteen wrote, to give the family a nearby room where everybody gathered and passed around instruments and shared their memories of Clemons. As the week went by, a doctor told Springsteen it would take a miracle for him to recover, and that he would surely be wheelchair-bound and paralyzed.

“He certainly would have never played the saxophone again,” Springsteen said in the book. “I don’t know how Clarence would’ve handled this.”

Springsteen wrote that “the morning sun laid a pinkish veil over the St. Mary’s parking lot” as friends, family and E Street band members Max Weinberg and Garry Tallent arrived to see Clemons one last time. They stood beside his bed and Springsteen said he “strummed my guitar gently to ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’” as Clemons passed.

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Bruce Springsteen and his wife Patti Scialfa leave the Royal Poinciana Chapel in Palm Beach after a memorial service for Clarence ... Read More

After tears flowed and hugs were exchanged, Springsteen went back to a Palm Beach County hotel on “a beautiful sunny Florida day,” and went swimming deep in the ocean to try to exhaust himself as he faced a suddenly inexplicable world without his friend and cohort.

At the memorial service at Palm Beach’s Royal Poinciana Chapel, Springsteen wrote that “the thick Florida air filled my lungs with cotton…” Attending: The whole band, Clemons’ wives, Jackson Browne (who had a hit duet single with Clemons) and Eric Meola, the man who photographed the “Born To Run” cover. Clemons wanted his ashes taken to Hawaii with his wife and the women who meant the most to him, an idea that Springsteen said was something only Clemons could manage.

In the memoir, Springsteen writes movingly about how they met, bonded and bridged the black-white divide, not always easily, to create something “transcendent” together. “Clarence was elemental in my life and losing him was like losing the rain.

“I miss my friend,” Springsteen wrote in conclusion. “But I still have the story he gave me…and that story is going to carry on.”