Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © Demi Moore 2019

Cover design by Robin Bilardello

Front cover photograph © Matthew Rolston/Getty Images

Back jacket photograph © courtesy of the author

Demi Moore asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780007466092

Ebook Edition © September 2019 ISBN: 9780007468843

Version: 2020-11-06

Dedication

For my mother, my daughters, and my daughters’ daughters

Epigraph

THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.

meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

—Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part I: Survival

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part II: Success

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part III: Surrender

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Photo Section

About the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

The same question kept going through my head: How did I get here?

In the empty house where I’d been married, where we’d added on because I had more kids than bedrooms, I was now completely alone. I was almost fifty. The husband who I’d thought was the love of my life had cheated on me and then decided he didn’t want to work on our marriage. My children weren’t speaking to me: no happy birthday calls, no Merry Christmas texts. Nothing. Their father—a friend I’d counted on for years—was gone from my life. The career I’d scrambled to create since I moved out of my mother’s apartment when I was sixteen years old was stalled, or maybe it was over for good. Everything I was attached to—even my health—had abandoned me. I was getting blinding headaches and losing weight scarily fast. I looked like I felt: destroyed.

Is this life? I wondered. Because if this is it, I’m done. I don’t know what I’m doing here.

I was going through the motions, doing whatever seemed like it needed doing—feeding the dogs, answering the phone. A friend had a birthday and some people came over. I did what other people were doing: sucked in a hit of nitrous oxide, and, when the joint reached me on the sunken couch in my living room, I took a puff of synthetic pot (it was called Diablo, fittingly).

The next thing I remember, everything went blurry and I could see myself from above. I was floating out of my body into swirling colors, and it seemed like maybe this was my chance: I could leave the pain and shame of my life behind. The headaches and the heartbreak and the sense of failure—as a mother, a wife, and a woman—would just evaporate.

But there was still that question: How did I get here? After all the luck and success I’d had as an adult. After all the running I had to do to survive my childhood. After a marriage that started out feeling like magic, to the first person I ever really tried to show my whole self to. After I’d finally made peace with my body and stopped starving and torturing it—waging war on myself with food as the weapon. And, most importantly, after I’d raised three daughters and done everything I could think of to make myself the mother I never had. Did all of that struggle really add up to nothing?

Suddenly I was back in my body, convulsing on the floor, and I heard someone scream, “Call 911!”

I yelled “No!” because I knew what would come next: the ambulance, then the paparazzi, then TMZ announcing, “Demi Moore, rushed to the hospital on drugs!” And all of that happened, just like I knew it would. But something else happened that I didn’t expect. I decided to sit still—after a life of running—and face myself. I’d done a lot in fifty years, but I don’t know that I’d really experienced a lot, because I spent most of that time not quite there, afraid to be in myself, convinced I didn’t deserve the good and frantically trying to fix the bad.

How did I get here? This is my story.

Part I

Chapter 1

It may sound strange, but I remember the time I spent in the hospital in Merced, California, when I was five years old as almost magical. Sitting up in bed in my soft pink fleecy nightgown waiting for my daily round of visitors—doctors, nurses, my parents—I felt completely comfortable. I’d already been there for two weeks and was determined to be the best patient they’d ever seen. There in the clean, bright room, everything felt like it was under control: there were dependable routines at the hospital enforced by real grown-ups. (In those days, there was a sense of awe around the doctors and nurses: everyone revered them, and to be in their midst felt like a privilege.) Everything made sense: I liked that there was a way I could behave that would yield predictable responses.

I had been diagnosed with kidney nephrosis, a life-threatening condition about which very little was known—it had really been studied only in boys, to the extent that it was studied at all. Basically, it’s a retentive disease in which your filtering system isn’t doing its job. I remember being terrified when my genitals swelled up and I showed my mom and saw her reaction: pure panic. She got me in the car and rushed me to the hospital, where I ended up staying for three months.

My aunt taught fourth grade, and she’d had her entire class make get-well cards, on construction paper with crayons and markers, which my parents delivered that afternoon. I was excited by the attention—from older kids, kids I didn’t know. But when I looked up from the brightly colored cards, I saw my parents’ faces. For the first time, I could feel their fear that I might not make it.

I reached over and touched my mother’s hand and said, “Everything will be okay, Mommy.”

She was just a kid, too. She was only twenty-three years old.

My mother, Virginia King, was a teenager who weighed a hundred pounds when she got pregnant with me just out of high school in Roswell, New Mexico. Really, she was a little girl. She labored in pain for nine hours, only to be knocked unconscious at the last minute, right before I came into this world. Not the ideal first attachment experience for either of us.

There was a part of her that did not really ground in reality, which meant that she was able to think outside the box. She came from poverty, but she didn’t have a poverty mind-set—she didn’t think poor. She wanted us to have the best: she would never have allowed a generic brand anything in our house—not cereal, not peanut butter, not laundry detergent. She was generous, expansive, welcoming. There was always room for one more person at the table. And she was confident in an easygoing kind of way—not a stickler for rules.

Growing up, I was aware that Ginny was different—she didn’t seem like other moms. I can picture her in the car driving us to school, smoking a cigarette with one hand and putting her makeup on—perfectly—with the other, without even looking in the mirror. She had a great figure; she was athletic and had worked as a lifeguard at Bottomless Lakes State Park near Roswell. She was also strikingly attractive, with bright blue eyes, pale skin, and dark hair. She was meticulous about her appearance no matter what the circumstances: on our yearly trip to my grandmother’s, she would make my dad stop three quarters of the way there so she could put in her curlers and have her hair just right by the time we got into town. (My mom went to beauty school, though she never turned it into a career.) She wasn’t a fashion queen, but she knew how to put a look together with natural flair. She was always reaching for whatever was glamorous—she got my name from a beauty product.

She and my father made a magnetic pair, and they knew how to have fun; other couples flocked to them. My dad, Danny Guynes, who was less than a year older than my mom, always had a mischievous twinkle in his eye that made it seem like he had a secret you wanted in on. He had a beautiful mouth with bright white teeth offset by olive skin: he looked like a Latin Tiger Woods. He was a charming gambler with a great sense of humor. Not boring. The kind of guy who is always riding the edge—always getting away with something. He was very macho, locked in competition with his twin brother, who was bigger and stronger and had joined the Marines, whereas my dad was rejected because he had a lazy eye, as I did. To me it was our special thing: I felt like it meant that we looked at the world the same way.

He and his twin were the oldest of nine children. His mother, who was from Puerto Rico, took care of me for a while when I was a baby. She died when I was two. His dad was Irish and Welsh, a cook for the Air Force, and a terrible alcoholic. He stayed with us when I was a toddler, and I have memories of my mother not wanting to leave me alone in the bathroom with him. Later, there was talk of sexual abuse. Like me, my dad was raised in a home full of secrets.

Danny graduated from Roswell High a year before Ginny, and when he left to go to college in Pennsylvania, she felt insecure—even more so when she found out he had a female “roommate.” So she did what she would continue to do throughout their relationship whenever she felt a threat: she started seeing another guy to make him jealous. She took up with Charlie Harmon, a strapping young fireman whose family had moved to New Mexico from Texas. She even married him, though the union was short-lived, because the romance had the desired effect: Dad came running back. She divorced Charlie, and my parents got married in February 1962. I was born nine months later. Or so I thought.

WHEN PEOPLE HEAR “Roswell,” they think of little green men, but nobody talked about UFOs at my house. The Roswell of my early childhood was a military town. We had the biggest landing strip in the United States (it served as a backup strip for the space shuttle) at Walker Air Force Base, which closed in the late sixties. Besides that, there were pecan orchards, alfalfa fields, a fireworks store, a meatpacking plant, and a Levi’s factory. We were enmeshed in Roswell, very much a part of the fabric of the community. And our families were intertwined, so much so that my cousin DeAnna is also my aunt. (She is my mom’s niece and married my dad’s youngest brother.)

Mom had a much younger sister, Charlene—we called her Choc—who was a cheerleader at the high school. Ginny took on the role of chaperone, and I became the team’s miniature mascot. She would do things like sneak the whole squad into the drive-in by letting them lie in a giggly pile in the trunk of her car. I felt like I was one of the big girls—in on their shenanigans. They would dress me up in a matching uniform, and Ginny would do my hair. At school assemblies, I was the big reveal: running out in my little powder-blue outfit to finish the cheer, complete with the signature move they taught me, the ceremonial flipping of the bird. It was my first taste of being a performer, and I reveled in every second of it. And I loved seeing how happy it made my mother.

In those days, my dad was working in advertising for the Roswell Daily Record. In the morning he would leave my mom a pack of cigarettes and a dollar bill, which she spent on a great big Pepsi that she bought from the corner store and nursed all day long. My dad was driven to succeed: he worked hard, and he played hard—sometimes too hard. He would go out carousing with one of my uncles, and they were the kind of drinkers who got into fights. (Keep in mind: they were barely twenty.) It was not uncommon for my dad to come home pretty banged up after one of these benders. He loved fighting, and he loved watching people fight. When I was little—way too little—my dad would take me to watch local boxing matches with him. I remember being about three and standing on top of a chair peering into the ring. I asked my dad, “What color trunks do I root for?” Watching two men pummeling each other: that was our bonding time.

Both my parents had what you might call a relaxed relationship with the truth, but I think Dad actually got joy out of feeling he could get one over on someone. He would go to pay a check, for example, and say to the guy at the cash register, “I’ll flip you: double or nothing.” It was the gambler in him, always looking to get away with whatever he could. I didn’t have the words for it then, but his recklessness made me anxious. I was always on guard, on the alert for whether somebody was going to get angry. I have a vague memory of a man showing up at our house and pounding on the door when I was four, and of how terrified I was not knowing what was happening or why, but feeling the fear in my house. It was probably someone my dad had scammed. Or maybe he’d slept with the guy’s wife.

I was almost five when my brother, Morgan, was born, and I felt protective of him right away. I was always tougher than him. He’s a big guy now—six feet three inches and strong—but he was tiny as a kid, and so pretty people always assumed he was a girl. He was a fussy baby, and my mother indulged him: “Just give the baby what he wants!” was her singsong refrain. I remember on one very long drive to go visit my aunt in Toledo when Morgan was around two, my parents passed me a bottle of beer from the front seat, which I slowly administered to him all the way to our destination, the way you’d give a baby a bottle of milk. Needless to say, by the time we got out of the car, he wasn’t screaming anymore.

I’m not saying I was the perfect sister: my nickname for Morgan was, after all, “Butthole.” (One of my favorite forms of torture was to pin him down, fart into my hand, and hold it over his nose.) But I had a clear sense from early on that I had to look out for him—for both of us, really, because ours were not exactly helicopter parents. Once, when Morgan was three or four, he was standing on the back of the couch, looking out the window, and jumping, and I remember saying to my mother, “He’s going to fall and hurt himself!” He did, of course, and I tried to catch him, but I was too small. I broke his fall, but I couldn’t stop him from cracking his head open on the coffee table. It was like a scene out of a movie: my mom jumping up and yelling, “Don’t move!,” and wrapping his bleeding head in a towel before we rushed him to the hospital. He had fractured his skull, and for a long time after they stitched him up he looked like Frankenstein’s monster.

Soon after he was born we left Roswell for California, the first of a series of moves that would define our childhood. My mother figured out that my dad was having an affair, so she did what she’d been taught to do by her mother when your husband is fooling around: she got him away from “the problem.” It did not seem to occur to the women in my family that if you took your cheating husband along when you left, the problem came with you wherever you went.

For most people, the idea of moving is a big deal. All that change; having to find a new place to live; the hassle and stress of setting up life and finding a new doctor and dry cleaner and grocery store—not to mention getting your kids settled in new schools and figuring out the school bus route and so on. It would require a lot of thought and preparation and planning.

That’s not how it was for us. My brother and I have calculated that throughout our childhoods, we attended at least two new schools a year, and it was often more than that. I didn’t realize until much later that this wasn’t how everybody lived. When I hear about people who’ve had the same friends since kindergarten, I can’t imagine what that must be like.

Moving wasn’t dolled up for us kids. There would be a mounting sense that something was going on, a plan was being hatched, and the next thing I knew we’d be hitting the road in one of the many earth-toned vehicles my parents had over the years: the rust-colored Maverick, the brown Pinto, the beige Ford Falcon. (They were all brand new, except for my dad’s prized ’55 baby-blue Chevy Bel Air.) It was often presented as a necessity: Dad was so good at what he did—and he was good at what he did—that they needed him at another paper in another town. Our job was to support him. In those early years, moving didn’t feel like a big deal or a hardship. It was just what we did.

I WAS HOSPITALIZED for my kidneys a second time when I was eleven, and coincidentally or not, it was right after one of my father’s affairs. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know in any literal way that my dad was cheating, yet I can’t help but wonder if my kidney flare-ups weren’t my body’s way of expressing what was going on at home. It was a Band-Aid, but for a while at least, it put the focus back on our family.

Ironically, at that point things had seemed unusually settled: we’d moved back to Roswell a few years earlier, and it had felt like coming home. We lived in a sweet three-bedroom ranch; I had my own room, with a pink canopy bed and a matching bedspread. Morgan shared his room with my dad’s little brother George. (George had been living with us since I was five—as peripatetic as my parents were, they had taken him in without hesitation when my paternal grandmother died and he had no other place to go. He was like a big brother to me.) We’d made friends with the four kids who lived across the street, and we went back and forth between the two houses seamlessly—it was the first time we’d been in one place long enough for me to make friends I can really remember.

I was walking home from school one day when I felt a strange heat spreading through my body. The skin on my belly and my cheeks was getting tighter and tighter. I rushed to the bathroom and pulled down my pants to check my “cookie,” but this time I was swelling up everywhere.

At St. Mary’s Catholic Hospital in Roswell, I was surrounded by nuns. I quickly settled into the familiar routine: they had to measure my urine output and take my blood twice a day—it was before they invented those little plastic ports so they had to stick a new needle into my veins every single time. But even with all that poking and pricking, I felt at ease, knowing I was being taken care of.

By chance, Morgan had to get an operation for a hernia at the same time, and they put us together in one room. I was the expert on hospital life, and anyway, I was his big sister: as long as we were in that room, I was in charge. (We did argue about what to watch on television, though, and this was before remote controls, so to change the channel we needed to call in a nun. Morgan didn’t care—he was six—but I was worried about losing my status as world’s best patient. When he got better, I wasn’t sad to see him go.)

When I went back to school, I still had to have my urine tested regularly, and I would get pulled out of class to go to the principal’s office so they could make sure I had my snack. I was so bloated from steroids that a classmate asked me if I was Demi’s sister. I didn’t feel special the way I had at the hospital; I felt embarrassed and different. I didn’t want people to see me like this.

And so I was almost relieved when my parents told us we were moving again. My mother, I would later discover, had found a red pubic hair in my father’s underpants when she was doing the laundry, and after my parents battled it out they came to the inevitable conclusion that there was only one thing to do: move. Farther than usual this time, to the other side of the United States: Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.

This was a big deal. My parents sat us down and told us in advance, which raised the pitch of the whole thing. And this time we got an actual U-Haul. I remember filling it up with our beds, the green couch, my mother’s ceramic partridges, and that coffee table Morgan had busted his head on. When we’d finished packing, we didn’t think there was enough room for all of us in the cab. My mother was half kidding when she suggested I sit down on the passenger’s-side floorboard, by her feet. I took her up on the offer. It was fun down there: I laid out a blanket and an airplane pillow and made my own little cave. It was a very long drive, made longer by a blizzard that was so bad my dad had to pull over because he couldn’t see the road. I was down by the heater, so it felt cozy and safe in my spot.

CANONSBURG WAS VERY different culturally from New Mexico or California. We were from a “y’all” family, and everyone in Canonsburg said “y’uns” instead. (My mom’s accent was always strong, wherever we were; Morgan does a great impression of her asking for “a big ole Coke and a b’rito”—i.e., a burrito.) It was particularly hard for my brother, who was more introverted than I was and often got bullied. I was tougher, scrappier. My coping mechanism was to go into every new situation and immediately start operating like a detective: How does it work here? What are people into? Who are my potential allies? What should I be afraid of? Who holds power? And of course, the big one: How can I fit in? I would try to crack the code, figure out what I had to do, and master it. These skills would become essential later on.

We settled into a development of townhouses in a hilly area with a pond that froze over in wintertime, which meant we could go ice-skating. Morgan learned to ride a bike. I was eleven years old and loved gymnastics. I was also just on the verge of puberty. I was desperate for breasts: every night, I lay in my bed and actually prayed for them.

I wasn’t a child anymore, but my mom insisted that we still needed a babysitter; she didn’t trust me to look after Morgan by myself. The girl she hired was the older sister of one of my classmates—let’s call her Corey—who happened to be much more developed and mature than I was. I sulked when Corey’s sister came to babysit, not wanting anything to do with her. The next morning, Corey added to the indignity by announcing to the entire school bus, “I guess Demi still needs a babysitter.”

I can still feel the hot flush of humiliation surging through my body. I was furious that my mother had put me in this position—had set me up like that. I remember feeling so exposed I thought I might die.

I wasn’t going to let this define my stint at Canonsburg Elementary. I didn’t need a babysitter. What I needed was a boyfriend.

I chose the cutest boy in the class: a blue-eyed, shaggy-haired blond named Ryder. And in a very short time, I was doing my victory lap, parading around the school holding his hand. Which actually felt really nice—for a moment.

WHILE I WAS dealing with the normal preteen girl stuff, my parents were coming undone. I’ll never know what the catalyst was for their descent in Canonsburg, but things started to fall apart that spring.

One evening, as my dad was sitting in the kitchen making his way through his usual six-pack of Coors and listening to James Taylor, he decided to clean his gun. I remember the way he looked that night: when he drank, his lazy eye went even more askew, and everything about him seemed glazed over. He didn’t notice there was a bullet in the chamber. When it went off, he blew a hole in the wall and the bullet grazed his forehead. There was blood everywhere. After the mess was cleaned up, my mother laughed it off, though inside I’m sure she was terrified. When I think about someone getting hammered and taking out a loaded gun in a house with kids running around, it’s just beyond me.

Another night that spring, I woke up to the sound of distressed voices and commotion. I stumbled into my parents’ room, where I found my mother thrashing and crying as my father struggled to hold her down. By the bed I saw a bottle of yellow pills. “Help me!” he screamed when he noticed me in their doorway. I walked toward them in a trance, not knowing—but on another level understanding completely—what I was witnessing: my mother trying to kill herself.

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. Any sense that I could count on either of my parents evaporated. In that moment, with my fingers in the mouth of my suicidal mother, who was flailing like a wild animal, and the sound of my father screaming directions at me, I moved from being someone who they at least tried to take care of to someone they expected to assist them in cleaning up their messes.

Chapter 2

It was the early seventies, and my mom did what people were starting to do: she went to a therapist. She was going to get help and get better. She was going to find herself! There was the ambient energy of the women’s movement floating around the culture at that time, and we had a feminist neighbor my mother became friendly with who probably introduced Ginny to some of the ideas and catchphrases of women’s liberation. But in her fragile state my mom was impressionable: after she saw The Exorcist, she went through a Charismatic Christianity phase. She would take me to services at a Catholic church where they played George Harrison songs and danced around in dashikis.

She was trying to figure out who she was. Sometimes I would “overhear” her talking with our neighbor at the kitchen table about how she was struggling. (I was such a snoop, my parents would joke that I “didn’t want to miss a fart.” But looking back, I see that what I was doing was patrolling for chaos. My mother had just tried to kill herself: I had to stay on high alert.) She would complain about the ways my dad didn’t appreciate her and the deprivations of her childhood. They had been so poor that one Christmas she got her own doll wrapped up as a present, just wearing new clothes. To her, that doll symbolized the scarcity of her upbringing—the lack of money, nurturing, and attention she grew up craving. I heard that story many times.

I could feel the dynamics shift just a little in our house: for years, my mom had put up with my dad’s cheating and had been completely dependent on him financially and emotionally. It’s sad to say, but when she tried to kill herself, it had the effect of reclaiming a little power: she had shown my dad she might be capable of leaving him. Unfortunately, she had shown her children she was capable of leaving us, too.

My mother was repeating her own family history. Her first experience of male love was from the same kind of flirtatious, charismatic troublemaker as my dad. My maternal grandfather, Bill King, didn’t think much of my dad when my mother first started going out with him in high school, but the two men had a lot in common. Granddaddy was a charming womanizer and rule bender who played stand-up bass in a country band. He was very tough: one time when he had a toothache and they didn’t have the money for a dentist, he went up to the bathroom with a razor blade and cut the tooth out himself. Eventually, Granddaddy had a wild death to match his wild life: he was out drinking one night when he drove his beloved blue El Camino into—and under—a moving truck. He was decapitated.

I was ten when he died. I remember him as a silver fox, handsome and rugged, his strong hands stained by motor oil. He owned a little gas station where my cousins and I loved to play, but when my mom was young, he was out of work for a long time after he broke his back on the job, working construction with a road crew. My grandmother had to support them and the three daughters they had at the time—my mom and her older sisters, Billie and Carolyn. This was distinctly not the life my grandma Marie had hoped for. She had her heart set on going to college. Growing up on the border of Texas and New Mexico in a strict Pentecostal home, she was the first member of her family to graduate high school. But Marie ended up a young wife and mother working full time to make ends meet. She was stretched thin.

My mother’s interpretation of my grandma’s unavailability was that she, Ginny, was unlovable. She was a skinny, sickly child, and she never got over feeling neglected—never enough money, never enough love, an afterthought. It never occurred to her that my grandmother simply didn’t have the bandwidth to nurture her the way she might have wanted. Ginny wasn’t able to put herself in my grandmother’s shoes and imagine what it was like for her as a young woman, living with a cheating husband for whom she’d given up her dreams, having to support a family without the benefit of training or education—and taking care of three little kids on top of that.

My grandma Marie was by far the most dependable grown-up in my life. She was raised on a broomcorn farm in Elida, New Mexico, in the 1930s, and possessed a practical farmer’s do-what-needs-to-be-done competence. She was solid, consistent, and trustworthy. But for all her good qualities, she had taught my mother—who in turn taught me—some strange coping mechanisms. Whenever Granddaddy was unfaithful, he would convince Grandma Marie that it was the women who were the problem. He persuaded her after one affair that they had to move to get away from his pursuer, so they picked up and left for Richmond, California, where my mother was born. When Ginny was about twelve, after they’d moved back to Roswell, she came home early from school one day and walked in on her father in bed with his brother’s wife. His reaction was to scream at my mom—blame his daughter for the situation. He had been my mother’s safe harbor; she worshipped him. Their relationship was never the same after that.

ONE HOT SUMMER afternoon in Canonsburg, Ginny told me giddily that I should hurry and get packed; we were going to a hotel. It didn’t make any sense, but I got caught up in my mother’s enthusiasm as she hustled Morgan and me into her Pinto and took us to a nearby hotel with lots of blond wood, where everything was brightly lit and sparkling clean. My excitement fizzled into confusion and anxiety when she told us that we would be staying there because she was leaving Dad for her shrink, Roger. They were in love, she explained; Roger was paying for the room, and we would be moving with him to California, where he was going to build a glass house for us to live in. She even showed us the plans.

It was a solid sales pitch. She presented her new plan as perfectly reasonable and already settled, with no acknowledgment that her kids might experience some pain or fear or confusion about their parents splitting up. Partly, this was because she was too caught up in her fantasy to consider our feelings, but I also wonder if, at some level, she knew this was nowhere near the end of her relationship with my dad.

Roger was a tall, sandy-haired guy with blue eyes and wire-rimmed glasses who had grown up in Northern California. Clearly, he was not a therapist who subscribed to a professional code of ethics. It’s heartbreaking when you consider that my mother went to him trying to find help: she saw him as the answer to all her problems, a sober, educated man who could put her on a different path. Instead, she found one more guy to complicate her life. He prescribed her uppers and downers, and I doubt she was following the recommended dosage. The pills, along with the alcohol she drank to wash them down, made her more unpredictable than ever.

My parents started going through the motions of splitting up. My mother moved in with Roger, and we alternated between staying with her at the hotel and with my dad at the apartment. A few weeks later, he told us we were going on a road trip. Off we went to Ohio, to visit my aunt and uncle in Toledo. Only he didn’t tell my mom. From her perspective, we had all just vanished. (I can only imagine the powerlessness and raw panic she must have felt.) Dad told our relatives that she had abandoned us for Roger without a word, that he had no idea how to reach her, and they believed him. Morgan and I were so accustomed to things not adding up that I don’t know if we even bothered to question the situation, or wonder why Ginny wasn’t calling and checking in on us. In any case, we were distracted: my aunt and uncle took us with their kids on a road trip to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. For me the main attraction was Minnie Pearl, who had, always, a price tag dangling from her hat.

None of this would fly now, of course, in the age of cell phones, Instagram, email, and FaceTime, but it was easy to disappear in the seventies. My dad had made it something of a specialty. When we were in one place long enough for bills to start showing up at the door, he would write “deceased” next to his name on the envelope and take it back to the post office. I remember a microwave he bought from Sears—when microwaves seemed like a miraculous invention—that he made Morgan sign for when the deliveryman brought it to our house. My dad then told Sears he wouldn’t pay for it because a child’s signature wasn’t legally binding. He stiffed stores for all kinds of things with schemes like that; he was a creative guy. If either one of my parents had ever applied their intelligence to something constructive, I honestly believe they could have been highly successful. They had the brains, they just didn’t have the tools to pursue a positive path. And so much of their energy was focused on self-sabotage, or on sabotaging each other—I think we treat the people we love the way we believe, in our deepest hearts, that we deserve to be treated ourselves.

That summer in Toledo, my dad had no idea how to be alone with us. I had always felt connected to him, but he was so withdrawn by this point that it was impossible to feel close. He loved us, sure. But he hadn’t kidnapped us because he was determined to spend quality time with his children or because he was genuinely afraid Ginny would take us to California and he’d never see us again. I think our time in Ohio was just one extended power play in my parents’ never-ending love-hate struggle—and I suppose he won that particular round. Because somehow, by the end of the summer, he’d convinced my mom to forgive him for kidnapping her children, and we headed back to Pennsylvania so they could give it another shot.

Everything was going to be different. We were—of course—going to move, to a bigger house in another town in Pennsylvania called Charleroi, thirty miles outside of Pittsburgh. It was a step up on every level. A spacious, modern house painted avocado green, with high ceilings and shiny new appliances that my mother loved. The plumbing needed work, but Dad was good at that: he blew cigarette smoke through the pipes and had Morgan sit up in the bathroom and yell down to tell him which was the hot tap and which was the cold based on where the smoke came out.

Of all the places we lived, I think that house most closely matched my mom’s fantasy of what life should look like. Unlike her mother, Ginny’s aspirations early on were conventional: she wanted to be a beautiful wife and mother who was adored by her husband and had a nice home. And she had made nice homes for us, everywhere we went. She had a knack for decorating; she managed to whip each house we lived in into shape almost as soon as we got there: sewing curtains, arranging the furniture and knickknacks she got from a company called Home Interiors, and generally making things look lived in, as if we’d been there for years. But at the Green House, as my brother and I called it, she outdid herself. That house was the embodiment of her domestic ambitions. I was even allowed to get a puppy. Unfortunately, it went to the bathroom in front of my dad’s closet and he gave me a “spanking” for that with his belt. (I didn’t cry, though. I never, ever cried, no matter what.) The puppy went back.

Of course, nothing was really different in Charleroi. The same stuff was just happening in a different house. Danny was gambling and drinking to excess. He was an excellent pool player, and, when he was lucky, he would convince some unsuspecting fool to bet against him, saying that he could win with one eye covered. Then Danny would cover up the lazy eye he could barely see out of anyway, and proceed to rake in the other guy’s money.

It didn’t always go his way. He lost huge amounts of money playing poker and would come home raging, drunk, and broke. At one point my father turned to a mafia loan shark to cover his gambling losses, and he was indebted to the mob for years afterward. He had already been working with them to sway local elections for mafia-favored candidates and other low-level, unsavory stuff like that. However indirect my dad’s involvement, it was still dangerous. He got into a shoot-out outside of a bar in Charleroi once. Another time, my mom went with a female friend to a pub in town and was spotted by a mobster who called my dad: he told my dad that mob women weren’t supposed to be out unaccompanied like that; it didn’t look right.

I, meanwhile, started seventh grade, which in Charleroi was part of the giant, terrifying high school. As always, I was the new girl. It’s possible that all the adapting I had to do primed me to become an actress: it was my job to portray whatever character I thought would be most popular in every new school, in every new town. I identified the in crowd and studied them for clues: Did the cool girls wear bell-bottoms or hot pants? What were their accents like? What did I need to do to be accepted? Was it best to try to stand out or blend in? It would be decades before it occurred to me that I could just be whoever I truly am, not the person I guessed other people wanted to see.

Needless to say, whenever I started to get a sense of a place, to decipher how I might fit in through sports or the social scene or what classes I might be good at, it was time to pick up and leave. Usually without much warning, or any kind of logical plan.

I DON’T KNOW which of my dad’s illicit activities provoked this particular fight—whether it was another infidelity, or if he just got too nasty when he was drunk—but one afternoon when I was doing my homework to the background music of my parents fighting at the top of their lungs, I heard my mother scream, “I’ve had it with your shit!” She came storming into my room and told Morgan and me to grab our stuff and get in the car, we were going back to Roswell.

This was nothing out of the ordinary, of course: we were pretty efficient at packing by this point, and we were used to hitting the road for hours on end while my mother chain-smoked out the window. But going back to Roswell was a departure from the exhausting routine of starting over from scratch. Insofar as we understood the concept, Roswell was home. It was where we came from, where we had family and history and an understanding of the culture and the community. And then there was Grandma Marie, whom I’d called “Mother” as a little girl, and who was, in many ways, the only adult I really trusted. Staying with her was grounding, soothing. When we got to her house, it was a relief just to be in her midst.

Even with half a dozen states between them, my parents managed to keep their drama explosive. The screaming phone calls began almost as soon as we arrived—my father’s voice was so loud through the receiver it felt like he was there in the room. My mother would stalk around the house sobbing histrionically, while I tried to stay out of her way. Morgan escaped into his projects: taking apart and putting back together the vacuum cleaner motor, disassembling the alarm clock to see how it worked. When my aunts came around, I realized they were shooting knowing glances at each other during my mother’s outbursts and drinking binges. For the first time I felt embarrassed by her. And I was ashamed of myself for feeling that way.

Ginny wanted me to take her side and tell everyone how horrible my dad had been to her, but I couldn’t. Aside from the gambling, I felt they were equally to blame for the chaos in our lives. Now that I was old enough, I could see how childish she was compared to her sisters—how rarely she took responsibility for herself, and how her default mode was to blame everyone else: my dad, my grandmother, whoever. Little by little, I started to wall myself off from her. With my grandmother around, I didn’t need to overlook my mother’s craziness just to survive.

So, on the inevitable afternoon when Ginny said we were going back to my dad, I didn’t get up and start packing as I always had in the past. Dad had gotten a new job in Washington State, north of Seattle, Ginny told me and my grandmother, and the plan was to return to him in Pennsylvania and then move to the other side of the country together as a family.

I looked at my grandmother. I looked at my mom. And then I said, “I’m not going.” Ginny didn’t give me a good enough reason for returning to the man she’d been spending all of her waking hours maligning to her family or fighting with on the phone. I was sick of things not adding up. Whatever it was they were doing, I didn’t want to be a part of it. My mother tried to persuade me, but she saw that I was immovable. She took Morgan and went back to Charleroi without me.

That summer, I did gymnastics at the Y, where I made my first best friend, Stacy Welch. My grandmother enrolled me in the better public school in Roswell in the fall—we weren’t zoned for it, but Grandma Marie finagled it by dropping me off every morning at Stacy’s house, and then Stacy and I would walk to the bus or Mrs. Welch would drive us to school. I made the cheerleading squad. Suddenly, I was living like a normal person, like everybody else. It felt great.

Once Ginny made it to Washington with my brother, I started getting the push: “You should come up here; it’s beautiful, you’d love it!” And there was a part of me that felt you should be with your parents—a dutiful pull. But why? I was doing fine.

My grandmother took care of me with a consistency I’d never before experienced. She made sure that I finished my homework, brushed my teeth, got to bed on time. She let me paint my room bright yellow because I loved Tweety Bird so much. She was attentive to everything in my life, including the friends I was making at school. If I went to the movies, she would pick me up, or, if she was working, she’d arrange to have someone else get me. Never once was I left standing on a street corner, wondering if anyone would show up. The daily disasters of life with my parents were nonexistent. In essence, I got the version of my grandmother that my mother had always yearned for.

After my granddaddy died, my grandmother went through a prolonged mourning period. For almost two years, every day when she got home from her job in the office of a legal title company, she lay on the couch in the living room without turning on the lights. Then she met a lovely guy named Harold and found love again. They had their regular schedule, and I became part of their routines: Tuesday and Saturday nights they went dancing, so I either had a sleepover at a friend’s house or someone came and slept over with me. Wednesday was Grandma Marie’s standing appointment at the beauty parlor, and when she finished getting her hair done after work, we would go out to dinner, just the two of us, at one of the usual spots: the Mexican restaurant, Furr’s cafeteria, or the Chinese place. The Roswell rotation.

It was a halcyon period of safety, a time when I saw what a parent could be—should be—and an example I would look to when I became a mother. And yet, I started to get restless. By that point, I was conditioned to not stay in one place for too long. I didn’t have any experience in following through; I had no barometer for the hardships—or the rewards—of commitment. I’ve often wondered what my life would be like if I’d remained in Roswell. I would have had to work on developing and maintaining friendships, which had always been disposable. I would have had to set goals for myself, which I’d never done, because we weren’t in one place long enough to see them through.

None of that happened. I had learned to crave extremes: it was like I needed the juice of it. I lasted six months in Roswell. Then I went back to my parents.

Chapter 3

I was with my family in Washington for just two months before they decided we were moving, this time to Southern California—and in a hurry. Maybe it was because of a mistress, maybe they were dodging a bill collector, or maybe the Pacific Northwest chapter of the mafia had figured out where to find my dad. We may simply have been evading Roger the therapist. My mother had stolen his credit card, and we used it to pay for our trip to California.

Somewhere along the never-ending nineteen-hour drive to Redondo Beach, my dad got badly beaten up; his face was swollen and bruised and he had a black eye. He looked awful: I can picture his battered face behind the wheel. In keeping with the silence that surrounded every unpleasant aspect of my family’s life, there was no explanation or discussion.

Once we were installed in our new place in Redondo Beach—an apartment in a beachy, stucco, pseudo-hacienda-style complex a mile from the water—my mother told me that when anyone called I should say that both my parents were away and couldn’t be reached. They were eluding the phone company, the electric company, and credit card carriers—all of whom would ask to speak to the variations of my parents’ names they’d been given, like “Virginia King,” my mother’s maiden name, or my dad’s first and middle names, “Danny Gene.” My parents even rented our apartment under the names of my aunt DeAnna and my uncle George, my father’s little brother, who lived nearby in L.A.

This came to light when George and DeAnna decided to move into our apartment complex and discovered that, thanks to my parents, they were already there. I don’t even remember them being particularly angry about it; they simply assumed my parents’ names for the purposes of their own lease. Having my aunt and uncle so close by was a huge comfort. As my mom and dad spiraled further out of control, George and DeAnna filled in the gaps time after time: they gave us rides when we needed them, fed us, listened to us when we had problems. They took me to my first concert: Aerosmith, in 1975. (They wanted to sit up in the stands; my friend and I were desperate to get onto the grass down where the action was. During “Sweet Emotion,” I remember, a stranger casually passed me a bottle of rum; I went to lift it to my mouth, but DeAnna snatched it away.)

Southern California in the mid-seventies was different from anywhere we’d been before. I was in seventh grade—at my third school that year—and all the cool kids wore Dittos jeans and smoked cigarettes and pot. I became close with a girl named Adrien, who had long blond hair: the quintessential California girl in a tube top. She was my mentor in misbehaving, introducing me to hard liquor and Marlboro Reds.

I got busted smoking at school and was sent to the principal’s office. My punishment was suspension. I was horrified. I’d never been in trouble before; up until then fitting in had never required acting out. My mom came to pick me up, and we were quiet on the way home. Then she removed a cigarette from her pack, waved it in my direction, and said, “Go ahead.” Instead, I took out one of my own. She reached over and lit it, and we never talked about it again.

That marked the beginning of a new stage in our relationship. I was only thirteen, but when I asked Ginny if I could go with friends to a club in the Valley, she said, “Sure—take the car. If you get stopped by the police just say you’re driving it without your parents’ permission.” I had learned how to drive back in Roswell, but I didn’t know the Valley. I didn’t know the freeway. I had no experience driving at night. Somehow, I made it to the club, with two other kids—who are lucky to be alive—as my passengers. From then on, I was regularly assigned to run family errands in that car. “Just remember: we don’t know you’re driving it,” Ginny told me. It was convenient for my parents, and it was one more way of seeing what they could get away with.

My parents didn’t set boundaries for me because they couldn’t even set them for themselves. They were drinking more than ever and taking Percodan, Valium, and Quaaludes that my father somehow obtained prescriptions for and filled at different drugstores using all my parents’ various aliases. He had the look to go with the partying: bell-bottoms and long sideburns. He even got a perm.

As for my mother, she often got aggressive when she mixed drugs and alcohol, and my parents got kicked out of restaurants and bars as a matter of course. My mom would start a fight with other patrons or lose her temper with my dad and start breaking dishes. Once, when she didn’t like the way the check was delivered, she took off her high-heeled shoe and used it as a weapon against the waitress.

Somehow, in the middle of all their partying, my mom found a good job as a bookkeeper for a magazine distribution company owned by a man named Frank Diskin. DeAnna started working for him, too, and suddenly my family had more money—especially my mother. Frank gave her luxurious bonuses: a mink coat and, eventually, the ultimate status symbol for a New Mexico girl of that era, a Cadillac Seville in pale yellow. We ended up moving into the nicest house we’d ever occupied in Marina del Rey, with Frank Diskin paying our rent.

Why was this guy willing to spend so much on his bookkeeper? DeAnna remembers that whenever my mother was alone with Frank in his office, the door was always locked.

EVER SINCE THE episode in Canonsburg when my mother had tried to kill herself, I’d been subconsciously waiting for another disaster—another truly devastating situation that didn’t make sense, that I couldn’t control, and that would upend my already unstable life. It arrived without warning when I came home from school one day to find that my brother, my father, and almost every trace of them had vanished. “Where’s Morgan?” I asked my mother. “Where’s Dad?” It was not unprecedented for my dad to go missing, but my brother? She shrugged. “Your father and I are getting a divorce,” she said. “And he’d only consent if I gave him Morgan.”

I was stunned. I don’t know what was worst: losing my brother, losing my dad, or finding out that my father couldn’t bear to be parted from Morgan but was fine with abandoning me.

“You and I are moving to West Hollywood,” Ginny informed me. “I’ve found an apartment on Kings Road.” Frank Diskin was out of the picture. As my mother and DeAnna told it, the IRS had been after my father for back taxes for years, and when they caught up with him, he gave them dirt on Diskin in exchange for his own freedom. Basically, he offered the government the same deal he’d offered so many others: double or nothing.

There was only one problem. Losing Diskin meant losing our relative prosperity. Both my mother and DeAnna were out of jobs, and my family wouldn’t be able to stay in the house in the Marina. My mother was furious, and I guess for her it was the final straw that convinced her she’d be better off without my dad. Evidently, my father had hit a breaking point, too: before he left, he’d cut Ginny’s beautiful mink coat into pieces.

I was still reeling when she took me to see our new neighborhood. She was on a manic high, pointing out all the bars and movie theaters, the shops and restaurants. The complex where we were going to live was massive, but the actual apartment was tiny: one bedroom, which we would share; a kitchenette; and a little balcony overlooking the pool. It was like everything in my life was shrinking: my home, my family.

NOW THAT IT was just the two of us, my dynamic with Ginny shifted. It was more like we were sisters than mother and daughter. I was already used to living without rules or limits, but now we even started to look more like peers. I was developing into a teenager; and Ginny basically dressed like one, in miniskirts and low-cut tops. She dolled herself up every time she went out the apartment door. She had deliberately chosen a building where there were other single people and divorcées, and she made friends with one of our neighbors, Landi, who would go with her to the bars.

From our balcony, I used to see this beautiful girl hanging out at the pool, swimming and lying in the sun, growing ever more golden. She was the most radiant creature I’d ever seen, a German actress a few years older than I was, named Nastassja Kinski. I became her friend and acolyte.

The director Roman Polanski had brought Nastassja and her mother to America so that Nastassja could improve her English and her accent at Lee Strasberg’s acting studio. Polanski wanted Nastassja to star in Tess, a romantic tragedy he was going to make based on the Thomas Hardy novel, and he was willing to put off the film until she was ready. That’s how much faith he had in her, which certainly made sense to me. As far as I could tell, she was perfect.

She was self-possessed and in her body like nobody I’d ever seen before. She owned her sexuality completely, without self-consciousness or discomfort, with complete confidence and ease. In my whole life, I haven’t met many who have that in the way that she did. Nastassja was only seventeen, but she had already been in four films. Her star was on the rise in Hollywood, and she regularly received scripts from directors who wanted to work with her. That’s where I came in. Nastassja could speak English well, but she couldn’t really read it, so she asked me to read the screenplays out loud to her so she could decide which ones she wanted to pursue.

She would stare at me with her enormous green eyes, listening intently, and by the time I finished reading her a script, she’d know exactly what she thought; she had total clarity in her opinions. I was as dazzled by her confidence and her sense of direction as I was by her beauty and sensuality. And I saw the breathtaking effect that combination had on other people: like me, they were overcome by her sense of comfort, freedom, and power—though I doubt I identified it as power at the time, as the concept was unimaginable to me. I didn’t know what it was that she had, but I wanted it for myself.

Nastassja’s mom may have been even less reliable than mine. It had fallen to Nastassja, from the age of twelve, to support them both. I wasn’t paying for my mother’s life (yet), but I understood the feeling of being responsible for the person who was supposed to be responsible for you. Emotionally, it felt like it was my job to keep Ginny alive. It was a sad but powerful thing Nastassja and I had in common. For a time, we were very close.

I decided to follow Nastassja’s example—I wanted to do what she did, and if that meant acting, then so be it. I learned by watching, observing, asking myself: How is this person doing this? What do you need to do to make this work—do you need to get an agent? (Not: I want to be an actor, mind you. But: How do I make this happen?) I went with Nastassja to her dance classes, trying to emulate her grace, and one night she took me along to dinner with Polanski. He tracked me down to invite me to dinner a second time months later, and I went with my mom. He was a perfect gentleman on both of those evenings, but he had been convicted of having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl. (I saw this dynamic all around me. Thirteen was a little extreme, but in my world, believe it or not, relationships with underage girls was the norm.) He expected probation following his plea bargain, but the judge saw it differently. Faced with imprisonment, Polanski fled the United States just a few days after that second dinner. He ended up making Tess in France; the film received three Oscars, and Nastassja won a Golden Globe.

I was disappointed when she moved out of the apartment building. It would be two decades before we saw each other again—unexpectedly, at Elizabeth Taylor’s regular Sunday lunch. When we embraced, it was like a homecoming. We knew each other in a way that no one else could.

MY DAD WAS living with Morgan in Redondo Beach, and we went to visit them—he wouldn’t let Morgan come to our place. Ginny was behind the wheel in the yellow Cadillac she had managed to hang on to from Diskin, with Landi along for the ride in back. I sat in the passenger seat, explaining to Landi the complicated history of my parents’ relationship, which I had put together from years of snooping around. For instance, I knew from poking through the metal fireproof box where documents were stored that my birth certificate was dated November 11, 1962, and that the date on my parents’ marriage license was February 1963—which at first I had assumed was a mistake: it should have said February 1962, nine months before I was born. But I’d since realized that they don’t make mistakes on that kind of thing. Obviously, it took Ginny a while to get divorced from that guy Charlie she was with when my dad went to college, so she could marry my dad, who got her pregnant with me, and . . .

I stopped. I turned toward my mother. And out of my mouth came the words, “Is he my real father?” Somewhere deep down, though, I already knew the answer.

She snapped, “Who told you that?” But nobody told me. Nobody had to.

A flood of questions came into my head. Who else knows about this? Everybody, as it turned out: all my cousins, even the younger ones, knew that Danny was not my biological father. I thought of all the times I’d told them about the ways I was like him, how I inherited my eye problems from him, my love of spicy food, and they had stood there, looking at me, knowing I was clueless, deluded. Why wasn’t I ever told? “Because your dad never wanted you to know,” Ginny said. “He made everyone promise because he thought you wouldn’t feel the same about him.”

Ten minutes later, we were at my dad’s impersonal stucco two-bedroom apartment. My mother dropped the bomb the second we walked in the door: “Demi knows.” In no time, she had a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and she seemed high on the drama of the situation—the power it had given her to hurt him.

He avoided meeting my eyes. He looked numb. It was only one in the afternoon, but he had likely polished off a six-pack before we got there.

Nobody asked me if I was okay, or if I had questions. Neither of my parents seemed to care about what this revelation meant to me.

They went into the bedroom and kept fighting, or maybe they started having sex . . . with them there was always a fine line.

I felt exposed and stupid and somehow dirty. So I did what they’d taught me to do when the shit hit the fan. I got in the car and took off. Not for good—yet. I had nowhere to go but back to my mother’s apartment. But I was practicing.

Chapter 4

Not long after the bombshell dropped, I was visiting my aunt Choc in Amarillo, Texas. I told her that I knew about my dad. “It’s about time,” she said. She’d always liked my biological father, Charlie, she told me, and had happy memories from the time she spent with him and my mother. “You know, he lives in Texas,” she added. “We could try calling him.” She did, and the next day he showed up at her door. I didn’t know what to feel or how to behave: he was a stranger, but he was my father. He was handsome, about five-ten, with brown hair, probably around thirty-five years old at the time. I looked to see where I might connect. In fact, my eye problem was something I’d inherited from my father—this father. He had been devastated, he told me, when my mom left him, and he had always wanted to meet me.

I was fourteen, and I wasn’t equipped to cope with this situation. And it only got worse: Ginny showed up. Never content to let drama unfold without her at its center, she got on a plane the second Choc told her that Charlie was coming. When she arrived, she whisked Charlie off into a room alone. I spent the entire day compulsively rolling joints and smoking them, acting like I was just fine and didn’t need a thing.

Charlie, on the other hand, was excited, and invited me to come and visit him and meet my grandparents and half siblings. A few months later, I flew to Houston and he picked me up at the airport—with his mistress. He dropped her off on the way to see his parents, who were so happy to meet me; they’d always wanted to, they said. As it turned out, my grandma Marie had snuck them a few photos over the years, knowing how much it would mean to them. I stayed with them that night.

Charlie’s wife felt insecure—and rightfully so: he’d introduced me to his mistress first—and was reluctant to meet me. I went over to his house on my second day to meet her and my half siblings—one of whom was a brother from yet another one of Charlie’s marriages who looked exactly like a male version of me. It was awkward. I didn’t know where I fit in or even why I was there. I left feeling clear about one thing: Charlie may have been my biological father, but Danny was my dad.

The justification for having kept my paternity a secret from me was that Danny feared that if I found out, I would feel differently about him. But the reality was that once I knew, he pulled away from me. Even before my parents’ split, he had become distant, withdrawing into drinking and drugs. And, of course, once they decided to divorce, it was my brother he couldn’t live without, not me. But after my discovery, our relationship completely deteriorated. He ceased making any effort to see me; he stopped calling; when we did see each other—when my mom and I visited Morgan—he barely looked at me and his hugs were awkward and forced. He was just . . . gone.

DISCOVERING THAT I’D been lied to my entire life about something so profound wasn’t great for my relationship with my mother, either. Whatever fragile trust we had shared was shattered now that I realized she had gotten pregnant with me when she was still with Charlie, and then just come up with a lie that was more convenient than the truth. But like every child in history who has been let down time and again by her parents, I held out the irrational hope that my mother would change and become someone I could count on.

Instead, one afternoon when I came home from school, I found her sprawled across the bed, surrounded by empty pill bottles. I remember calling the hospital for an ambulance in a kind of frozen trance, a dissociated state that would become increasingly familiar to me as years passed, in which I would leave my body and just cope without really being present. An ambulance came and took us to the hospital to get her stomach pumped. Everyone in the building saw the arrival of the paramedics and her departure from the apartment on a gurney. I was somehow simultaneously embarrassed, numb, and terrified.

My mother survived that incident. But her faux suicide attempts became a regular occurrence, a routine. Back would come the emergency medical teams with their sirens and gurneys, and off we’d go to get her stomach pumped again. She didn’t want to die: she was crying out for help, and she wanted attention. Often, her overdoses followed some sort of devastating interaction with my dad. The man I thought of as my dad, anyway.

I was in a constant state of anxious vigilance. I never knew what I’d find when I walked through that apartment door: my mother’s self-destructiveness was boundless, narcissistic, and unstoppable. And yet I was developing armor: I took comfort in my ability to deal with her crises and the knowledge that I could handle whatever came my way. I never felt I was going to fall apart, never turned to anybody and said, “I can’t take this.” I could get through anything she threw at me: if she tried to kill herself; if I had to peel her off of a bar stool; if she told me Danny wasn’t my real dad. I would survive, no matter what. But I would survive by being on guard. And then, when crisis struck, by exiting my body: functional but frozen.

Everyone knew about my mother in our apartment complex, of course, and I adopted an invulnerable, self-sufficient persona in response. My character was on her own, unfettered by curfews or rules. Every time I tossed off “My mother doesn’t care if I . . .” or “I can do whatever I want . . .,” I rode the wave of that dubious freedom, but I also felt the emptiness of it. I did not feel particularly sympathetic toward Ginny. Even as a fourteen-year-old I realized that her self-absorption and “suicide attempts” came at my expense.

Her accelerating self-destructiveness lent an urgency to my attempts to define myself in opposition to her. I’m a different person, I kept telling myself. I’m not like that. But the insecurity that had been nipping at my heels was intensifying.

I was the girl whose mother was always trying to kill herself. I was the girl who’d been abandoned by two fathers. My wandering eye suddenly seemed like an obvious physical manifestation of the truth about me: I was just off, and everyone could tell. I had surgery just before I turned fifteen that finally fixed my eye, but in my own mind, I remained marked as broken.

All of this coincided with puberty. My transformation from a skinny, lazy-eyed kid to a young woman who men desired was confusing. The unfurling of my sexuality was linked for me on the deepest level with shame. It would be decades before I could even begin to disentangle the two.

I STARTED SPENDING time with a couple of guys who lived down the hall and were very friendly to me. They were older, in their mid- to late twenties, but I thought I could impress them and join their crowd by acting cooler and more mature than I actually was. I was alone a lot in my mother’s apartment, and sometimes they’d stop by to visit, or I’d wander down the hall and hang out with them at their place.

One evening, I was in their apartment drinking beer, and we were all flirting. It was fun at first: I was still quite innocent, just beginning to discover the effect I had on guys. But I wasn’t in any way prepared for the consequences. One of them made a move, and the other one disappeared. That was evidently what he had wanted from me all along, and somehow, I felt I had no choice, that it was my job to give it to him—like I was obligated to fulfill his expectation just because he harbored it. I blamed myself for acting provocative and older than my years.

Afterward, I was left with the hollow, empty feeling of being used. A new kind of lonely.

GINNY WAS NOT really interested in how I was doing at my vast new school, Fairfax High, and she didn’t care about my report card or even seem to register that such a thing existed. When we spent time together, it was as if we were a pair of girlfriends out on the town. She never offered me any guidance; there was no talk about college, for example, or discussion of my future. Instead, the conversation revolved around how unfairly life had treated her, what she had missed out on, and how she wanted to find the kind of relationship she deserved.

She succeeded for a while when she took up with a great guy named Ron Felicia, who owned a recording studio. They actually had a seemingly healthy relationship, and he really grounded her for the short time they were together. For a few months, we even moved in with him. I didn’t have to change schools, though I wouldn’t have minded—I wasn’t really involved in anything at Fairfax High. By that point, I was numb to the whole high school scene and was just trying to get through it. I’d managed to make few friends out of the thousand kids who were my classmates. (I’m sorry not to have crossed paths with Flea or Anthony Kiedis, who were at Fairfax at that time but whom I didn’t befriend until decades later—though I seriously doubt I was cool enough to run with their crowd.)

Through Ron, I met a guy who was kind of a pretty-girl-type agent. It was difficult to get work because I was inexperienced and underage: Helen Hunt, Jodie Foster—people like that had all been acting since they were very young. I was on the outside looking in at the entertainment industry, and as I had always done, I learned by the fake-it-till-you-make-it method. I’d love to say that the underlying drive came from a fascination with plays that I encountered in school, or from the thrill of performing classic roles in drama class. I wish that was how I came to acting, but, in truth, Hollywood was like one more school I had to figure out, one more system to game. I chipped away at it, trying to grasp how it worked. It would be years before I made a living as an actress, but that first agent did get me a small role on a TV show called Kaz playing a thirteen-year-old prostitute. My big first line that got me my SAG card was, “Fifty dollars, mister.”

As much as my mother wanted a relationship with a kind man, and Ron Felicia was that, she couldn’t sustain it. Instead, she felt compelled to ruin it and managed to—dramatically—when Ron came home one day to find her in bed with my dad. Ron was understandably furious, punched Danny, and threw my mother out. She and I hastily moved to a little studio in Brentwood right off Sunset—I drive by it all the time, and I always feel a little pit in my stomach.

There were always men. Ginny and I got a lot of attention from them when we went out together at night. I remember sitting at the bar at Carlos ’n Charlie’s, a trendy Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood. She was drinking too much and eyeing the guys at the bar flirtatiously. Whenever I recognized her boozy, blowsy come-hither look setting in I cringed. One of the men took the bait and came over to us. “Are you two sisters?” he asked. (It was Ginny’s favorite question.) “No.” She grinned. “This is my daughter.” The man protested that she couldn’t possibly be old enough to be my mother. And really, she wasn’t: she was a thirty-four-year-old woman with a fifteen-year-old daughter. She chuckled as he leered at me.

I was beginning to resent my role as her bar companion; it seemed like she was just using me as bait for these men—and as her designated driver, albeit one without a license.

When I look back, it’s incredible that we never got caught, but then again, in those days Ginny could have taught a master class at defying expectations (and odds). For somebody who was getting by on a thread, all the apartments we moved into, though small, were clean, often newly built, and generally in safe neighborhoods. We were never “slumming it.” Maybe she was continuing the game she and my father used to play, staying one jump ahead of the landlords by using aliases, but whatever the reason, in the first two years after my parents split, we moved seven times. One move was a matter of safety, after a guy she’d been dating got angry at her: I came home from school one day to find all the electrical wires cut and the smell of urine in our apartment. He’d come by and marked every corner of the place, like a dog.

The stress of being on the run from apartment to apartment was contributing, I’m sure, to my mother’s instability as well as my own anxiety. One night when I came home late, she was waiting by the door. “Where have you been? You know you’re supposed to be home by eleven,” she shrieked. Home by eleven? Never once had she mentioned a curfew or asked where I’d been or where I was going. When I gave her some smart-ass rejoinder, she raised her hand to hit me. I lost it. “How dare you suddenly try to be a mother!” I yelled at her. “Everything’s about you! So don’t pretend for a minute you care about me and what time I come home.” And instead of her slapping me, I slapped her. It felt good. She never raised a hand toward me again.

THE WORST COLLATERAL damage from all these moves was my education. When I went back to Fairfax to sign up for tenth-grade courses after our short stint in Brentwood, there were none available, at least not to me. I needed to make up credits, the school explained, and those courses were all filled. Why no one had told me about my lack of credits before I have no idea. Maybe they didn’t care, or maybe I didn’t.

The choices Fairfax presented to me were either to take noncredit courses like driver’s ed or to switch to a special “continuation” school that was attached to Fairfax and attended by kids who were misfits or had drug issues or learning disabilities. I didn’t fit into any of those categories, but that was the school I opted to attend, and I surprised myself by actively liking it and doing quite well there.

One thing was clear: I had to figure out a way to support myself so I could start leading my own life and escape from the crazy unpredictability of my mother’s. And that’s exactly what the continuation school offered: I entered a program called “four and four,” which entailed four hours of classes and four hours of paid work, for which you earned credit. My very first job, which I got through a girlfriend at school, was with a collection agency. My slightly husky voice made me sound older than my age, and every afternoon I called and threatened people to pay up, or else. I kept waiting for my mom and dad to appear on the call lists.

It felt good to have my own pocket money and not have to rely on my mother, and it enabled me to enroll in an acting class—which turned out to be my salvation.

Chapter 5

Despite her financial straits, from time to time my mom and her friends would hit L.A. hot spots like Le Dome, where Jackie Collins always went for lunch with her friends. We were there one night when a man who looked to be in his late forties or early fifties came over to our table and introduced himself as Val Dumas. He said if we liked Le Dome, we should come by his restaurant, Mirabelle, sometime. He had a vaguely Middle Eastern appearance; I remember thinking he resembled Bijan, that quintessentially eighties icon who was always splashed across billboards in a tuxedo flogging his perfume. Val was a tall, elegant man with an air of superiority or money—or both—dressed in a soft button-down shirt and neatly pressed slacks, and Italian loafers. He chatted us up for a while, and then when my mom couldn’t find her car keys, he offered us a ride home in his brown Mercedes but insisted I sit next to him in the passenger seat.

I had lunch with him at Mirabelle not long afterward. There were lots of plants, it had a relaxed, California-casual vibe, and the whole thing felt fun and harmless: it was broad daylight, and we were in public. I didn’t question why a middle-aged man would want to hang out with a fifteen-year-old girl.

He started showing up at school, waiting for me outside in his car after classes let out. It was easier not having to take the bus, and often we’d stop at Mirabelle and have something to eat at his regular table. I told myself he was like a friend of the family, but there was something about him that made me slightly uneasy—an unsettling sense I had that he wouldn’t always be so helpful and pleasant, a vague anxiety that there was something not quite right. I began to make excuses to avoid him.

Then one day when I got home from school he was there—inside the apartment, waiting for me. I felt the blood drain from my body. “What are you doing here?” I asked him. “Where’s my mom?”

I have blotted out the exact sequence of events—the details that led from me opening the front door, to wondering if my mother had given him a key, to feeling trapped in my own home with a man three times my age and twice my size, to him raping me.

For decades, I didn’t even think of it as rape. I thought of it as something I caused, something I felt obligated to do because this man expected it from me—I had let him expect it from me. I had eaten at his restaurant, and he had chauffeured me home from school. In my fifteen-year-old mind, I deserved what happened.

I couldn’t see that—as someone with no guidance or grounding, no sense of worth, someone who’d spent her whole life contorting herself to meet other people’s expectations—I was an easy mark for a predator.

And I had nobody to protect me.

In recent years, I have watched in awe as woman after woman has come forward to tell her story of sexual assault—amazed both by the courage of these women and by the attacks on their character that have inevitably followed. And yet people ask why it takes women years or decades to tell others what happened to them. All I can say is that anyone asking that question has never been raped. When you are sexually assaulted in a culture that tells you over and over again that admitting your victimization makes you a suspect—makes you a liar and a slut who deserves to have your life put under a microscope for all to see—guess what? You keep it a secret. And as with any trauma, denial is a natural human response. Things we can’t handle, things that are just too frightening and destabilizing, the psyche suppresses until the day comes when we can deal with them.

Unfortunately, even as we try to submerge our pain deep down inside, it finds a way to bubble up: Through addiction. Through anxiety. Through eating disorders. Through insomnia. Through all the different PTSD symptoms and self-destructive behaviors that assault survivors experience for years on end. These incidents may last minutes or hours, but their impact lasts a lifetime.

LESS THAN A week later, my mother told me we were moving again. I was happy to be getting out of the space where this ugly thing had happened to me—maybe if I was no longer surrounded by the walls of the apartment, I would stop feeling so disgusting, stop flashing back to staring at those walls while he was on top of me. But to my horror, Val showed up to help us move. I sat in the back seat of the Mercedes of the man who raped me, my mother sat with him up front, and he drove us to the cluster of Mediterranean-style duplexes off La Cienega where we were moving. Now there was nowhere safe to go: he’d be able to find me.

I felt like I was going to throw up as I got out of the car. Ginny was faster, plowing inside with her boxes, and in the seconds we were alone, Val turned to me and said, “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?” I stared at him blankly. And he said it again: “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?”

I’ll never know if Ginny accepted five hundred dollars from Val explicitly as payment for permission to fuck me. Perhaps it was murkier than that—perhaps he gave her some money under the pretense of helping out a friend, as a loan on the deposit for the new apartment. For all I know she’d already paid him back by having sex with him herself. But what is certain is that she gave this man the key to the apartment she shared with her fifteen-year-old daughter. I’ve mothered three fifteen-year-old girls: the idea of giving a grown man with dubious intentions unsupervised access to them is as inconceivable to me as it is repugnant. That’s not what a mother does.

And what I knew that day—what I know to this day—is that though Val may have given Ginny money with no clear discussion of what he would get in return, it’s also entirely possible Ginny knew exactly what he wanted, and it’s possible she agreed he could have it.

“How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?” It feels like you are an orphan.

SOON AFTER WE moved to La Cienega I met a musician in my acting class, a pedal steel guitar player named Tom Dunston who’d been touring with Billy Joel. He was an attractive twenty-eight-year-old, with a gentle presence. He immediately made me feel at ease. We started hanging out, and one night when we were alone I started to take off my clothes. Tom stopped me. “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “We can just be together.”

I told him about my mother’s suicide attempts, and her using me as bait. I didn’t talk about what had happened with Val. I never talked with anyone about what had happened with Val. By the time I met Tom, I had already walled it off behind the thickest plaster my psyche could construct. But I told him about everything else, and he listened.

So, when Tom invited me to move in with him, I said yes. He was waiting for me in his car when I walked out of my mother’s apartment the day after my sixteenth birthday. I never went back.

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