158
D
emi Moore turns up on the
doorstep of my rental house in
Wales in late July bearing gifts.
She unloads them herself from
the trunk of a black sedan, calling
goodbye to a driver she’s known
for two hours like it’s been two
years. (“See you sooon, Bryan!”)
There are biscuits. Gummies.
Wildflowers. A room spray that
claims to purify more than just
the scent of a space. There’s a
cashmere shawl (the one I’m now writing this in) from Debonnaire
in London, the same chic out-of-the-way gift guru where she bought
the patterned sack dress she’s wearing with scuffed Stan Smith’s, tiny
shards of gold glinting in her earlobes and on her dainty knuckles.
The minute she sets her things down in the little pink bedroom
upstairs (“I kind of like this girly one!” she says as she flops onto the
bed), the halls begin to smell otherworldly, like a spa or the neck of a
very cool girl at a downtown dinner party in the late ’ 90 s. The type
of fragrance that can’t be bought—it has to just waft from your pores
as a result of having a honed aesthetic and your very own lease on life.
And she has both. In her about-damn-time memoir, Inside
Out, Demi, 56 , outlines her improbable journey from Good Old-
Fashioned American Nothing to Hollywood Everything You Ever
Dreamed Of. But what you get from this book that you can’t get
anywhere else isn’t the rags-to-riches story but rather the honest
and arresting way she details her slow drift into a different kind of
emotional poverty, the sort that only decades of tabloid harassment
and unchecked trauma can alchemize. She narrates, with the preci-
sion of a butcher’s knife, her divorces, addiction, and eventual isola-
tion, but from this she pulls forth her most potent character yet: a
fully formed, gives-no-fucks woman of wisdom. Well, she does give
some fucks. It’s just that now they’re the right kind.
Let’s start where Demi does: a nomadic childhood crisscrossing
America as she and her younger brother lived according to the
whims of their charming, peripatetic parents, teenagers themselves
when they met and fell into an unending love affair that would be
referred to as toxic in the parlance of our times. This isn’t a Christmas-
trees-and-quirky-pj’s childhood story. Think Dickens as seen by Diane
Arbus, larger-than-life mania butting up against the poverty line.
Demi recalls springing into action to revive her mother, who had
overdosed in a bid to externalize the internal damage her relation-
ship was causing: “The next thing I remember is using my fingers,
the small fingers of a child, to dig the pills my mother had tried to
swallow out of her mouth while my father held it open and told
me what to do. Something very deep inside me shifted then, and
it never shifted back. My childhood was over.”Her childhood may have been over, but living according to her
parents’ gospel wasn’t, and she continued to be a pawn in their
dynamic even after it was made clear that her father, Danny Guynes,
was not, in fact, her biological progenitor.
It’s easy now to applaud Demi for the bravery of these confes-
sions, but looking back at her Vanity Fair cover story (August 1991 ,
titled “Demi’s Big Moment,” that notorious image of her moon-
shaped baby face plopped on top of a platonically ideal pregnant
body, shining and full), you will find that she never conformed to
Hollywood conventions of mystery: She was telling us all along.
Throughout the article by Nancy Collins she lays bare her reality
as the product of a parlor-floor war in which children were the
casualty. Buried between snide comments like “exactly where
Demi Moore stands in Hollywood is a matter of some debate”
and “being Mrs. Bruce Willis couldn’t hurt a girl in Hollywood”
(if this is her big moment, could you be a little sweeter, Nancy?!),
Demi plainly states, “There is a man who would be considered
my biological father who I don’t really have a relationship with.”
Lest we have any idealistic memories of a time before social
media when a woman could be an unadulterated movie star, this
profile makes it evident that beauty and ambition have never made
cozy bedfellows. “I’m sure there are a lot of people who think I’m
a bitch,” she said then, huddling with her firstborn, Rumer, in her
trailer (she refused, despite strong gravitational forces, to let her
children raise themselves, and this was the impetus for the break she
took at the height of her box-office power to be a full-time mom
in Hailey, Idaho). “I don’t fear to speak my mind.”W
hen I ask her about the skeptical,
dismissive tone of a piece meant
to herald her arrival, she says,
“Thank goodness people remem-
ber the photo, they don’t remem-
ber the article.”
The woman I see before me
today in Ystradowen (Vale of Glamorgan, Wales) is relaxed, not
defensive, but also not defenseless. (“I have zero interest in being a
victim” is a phrase she repeats and remixes throughout our week
together.) She is less can’t-stop-won’t-stop toughness and more
presence and peace. At night she changes into sweats and thick-
framed black glasses, the look she adopts as her uniform when she’s
home with her three daughters and eight motley dogs (some
missing legs, chunks of ears, blind as bats but loved to the gills). It’s
obvious, watching her yank the cherries out of an oatmeal cookie
with a goofy pluck, that this woman has done the work.
Not the work of starring in Indecent Proposal and Ghost and G.I.
Jane and every film that captured your adolescent imagination (though
she has done that, and she also coproduced the Austin Powers“The next thing I remember is using my fingers, the small fingers of a child, to dig the pills my
mother had tried to swallow out of her mouth while my father held it open and told me what to do. Something
very deep inside me shifted then, and it never shifted back. My childhood was over.”
➤Character study. Dress, glasses, and moccasins, Chanel Haute Couture. Ring, Chanel Fine Jewelry.