In which I struggle to understand the reasoning for risking everything you hold dear in life for the guy from Dude, Where’s My Car?

CBR11bingo #TrueStory

First off, this was not a book I would have ever read on my own. My book club chose it for October. That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate a celebrity memoir, I just don’t have any feelings one way or the other about Demi Moore.

Or at least, I didn’t. Now I guess I have a few.

Demi “tells all” in this book, which starts off with a drug overdose, complete with an out-of-body experience. She definitely knows how to hook the reading audience. With immediate promises to spill all the dirt about her marriages, her kids, and life in the Brat Pack, she makes big promises – which she mostly keeps.

Demi had a ridiculously chaotic childhood. Filled with alcoholism, paternity secrets, infidelities, and constant cross-country moves, Demi had trouble fitting in and making friends at school (she was never in the same school very long). She also had a chronic kidney problem, keeping her in the hospital frequently. Eventually, Demi’s parents split up and she lived with her mom in Los Angeles.

After starting a random friendship with Nastassja Kinski, Demi decided to try modeling and acting. She got a few modeling gigs, and soon moved out on her own. It should be noted here that Demi’s decision to move out is based upon her mother’s HORRIBLE and UNFORGIVEABLE parenting. Demi was on her own and living with an older man when she was only 15 or 16, already drinking hard and experimenting with drugs.

Demi gets married, gets discovered, and starts making movies and taking ALL of the cocaine. By the time she is hired for St Elmo’s Fire, she is divorced and known as such a hard partier, that the production puts her in mandatory rehab or she can’t have the job.

Demi drops a lot of names – Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Jon Cryer, Charlie Sheen. She describes going to a random party one night and meeting Bruce Willis, the start of their whirlwind courtship and marriage, with the birth of Rumer Willis not long after.

She talks a lot about her body and the clear eating disorder (while never named) she had for many years. She talks a lot about her relationship with drugs and alcohol. And it was clear that she would replace one addiction with another – replace drinking with exercising. Replace drugs with intense parenting. She did not do anything half-assed. She was all in on whatever was going on in her life.

EXCEPT for her marriages and relationships.

Demi admits that she was so busy always being who the man in her life wanted her to be that she never got to be herself.

She and Bruce split up after 3 kids, but stay friendly, living across the street from each other in Idaho.

And then she meets Ashton. And this is where I started yelling at her through the Bluetooth in my car.

She was not only in love with Ashton, she was addicted to him. And it caused her to make some crazy mistakes which ended up ultimately ruining her marriage and damaging her relationships with her children and Bruce.

It seems like Demi is in a pretty good place right now, so I assume getting all of her story out was cathartic for her.

I guess her story was interesting, if only because most of it took place in the public eye. Vanity Fair! StripTease! GI Jane! Emilio! Bruce! Ashton!

But I wasn’t all that enthused about it. I had issues with the writing – while I never doubted that this was Demi’s story, I had trouble believing that she “wrote” this book. And I so disliked her after her disastrous decisions while married to Ashton that I had trouble staying invested in the rest of the book. I’m glad she seems healthy and happy now, but I’m in no hurry to stream any of her old movies and relive her glory days.