After years of scrutiny for her career, relationships and setbacks, the movie star hopes the public sees another side in her memoir, "Inside Out", which will release on September 24
LOS ANGELES — A few days after I visited Demi Moore in her home high above Beverly Hills, her daughter Tallulah Willis told me, “My mom was not raised, she was forged.”
But the woman who greeted me from atop a staircase, in the boxy residence she calls her “peaceful Zen treehouse,” and asked if I was chilly or needed a jacket, was not the steely star whose movies, like “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “Ghost” and “A Few Good Men,” helped define the 1980s and ’90s. She was not the stylized deity venerated on magazine covers, not the inadvertent pioneer for pay equity in her industry, nor the walled-off enigma who, by her own design, resisted most efforts to reveal the authentic person behind the adamantine roles she played.
Dressed in a long-sleeve T-shirt, moccasin boots and a pair of prescription glasses with transition lenses, Moore sat cross-legged on the floor of her living room that late August morning and told me the story of her life.
It is an exercise that she has already undertaken in a memoir, “Inside Out,” which Harper will release Sept. 24. The book is a candid personal narrative, in which Moore fills in not only the details surrounding the most visible parts of her history — her Hollywood career and her much scrutinized marriages to actors Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher — but the portions of her life that she once fought to protect, including the confusing and all-too-abrupt childhood that preceded her choppy show-business ascent, and a more recent relapse into substance abuse that nearly tore apart her family.
As she writes in a typically unsparing self-assessment, “if you carry a well of shame and unresolved trauma inside of you, no amount of money, no measure of success or celebrity, can fill it.”
With the publication of “Inside Out” approaching, Moore told me she was both eager and anxious, at the age of 56, to finally let audiences see her as she sees herself, without any barriers or artifices.
©2019 New York Times News Service