Tag: addiction memoirs

Demi Moore In New Memoir: Ashton Kutcher Mocked Me For Drinking

The prolific actress says she relapsed after Kutcher questioned whether alcoholism was a real thing during their marriage.

Demi Moore is making headlines after the release of her new autobiography, Inside Out, where she drops major bombshells about her childhood, her relationships, and living with alcoholism.

In the book, Moore describes an exchange with ex-husband, actor and entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher, that made her question her sobriety and led her to relapse.

Relapsing During Their Marriage

“Ashton was enjoying a glass of good red wine when he said, ‘I don’t know if alcoholism is a real thing—I think it’s all about moderation. I wanted to be that girl. The girl who could have a glass of wine at dinner, or do a tequila shot at a party. In my mind, Ashton wanted that, too. So I tried to become that: a fun, normal girl.”

Moore, who was almost 20 years sober at the time, says she didn’t stop to consider that Ashton was just a young man who didn’t understand alcoholism at all. She used his uninformed thinking to justify her own return to drinking.

According to People, Moore revealed that the That ’70s Show star encouraged her to embrace her wild side during their marriage but when she went too far with her drinking, he would humble her with photos.

“Ashton had encouraged me to go in this direction. When I went too far, though, he let me know how he felt by showing a picture he’d taken of me resting my head on the toilet the night before. It seemed like a good-natured joke at the time. But it was really just shaming,” Moore writes.

Childhood Trauma

Moore also details various life-altering incidents from her childhood in Inside Out.

TW: Sexual Assault

In one of the book’s biggest revelations, Moore details how when she was 15, a middle-aged man began hanging out with her then-single mother, Virginia. One day, the man let himself into their house and sexually assaulted the teen but that would not be the last time she saw him. Shortly after the assault, the man helped them move into a new place.

During the move, the man asked Demi, “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?”

Demi then gets candid about the possibility that her mother played a role in her sexual assault.

“Though [the man] may have given Ginny [Virginia Moore] 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,” she writes.

Moore would go on to leave her mother’s house at 16 and head to Los Angeles where she would marry, have children and cultivate a career that would span decades.

Though Moore has experienced many ups and downs over her 56 years, she remains grateful for the life she is privileged to lead.

“I’ve had extraordinary luck in this life: both bad and good. Putting it all down in writing makes me realize how crazy a lot of it has been, how improbable. But we all suffer, and we all triumph, and we all get to choose how to hold both,” she writes.

View the original article at thefix.com

27 September 2019
Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness Details Past Sex & Drug Addiction

The Queer Eye star gets candid about his past addictions and trauma in his new memoir, Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love.

Jonathan Van Ness has come a long way from his small town upbringing. The resident hair expert on Netflix’s reboot of Queer Eye is known for his bombastic personality and style, but as he revealed in his new memoir, Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love, life wasn’t always so fabulous.

Midway through the book, he says, “Buckle up, buttercup, because I can go from comedy to tragedy in three seconds flat.”

Growing Up

Van Ness’s younger self was reckless, confused, and in pain—the result of the “compounded trauma” that followed him after being abused by a boy from his church. He realizes why people would be drawn to the sparkly persona he gives off on-screen, but said that he has a more serious side.

“When you have this much personality, there’s a fear lurking just below the surface: If you knew all of me, you wouldn’t love me anymore. You would no longer want me as your new best friend,” he wrote.

Van Ness grew up in the town of Quincy, Illinois, a “little baby queen” with a big personality. He was bullied in school. “I was too fat, too femme, too loud and too unlovable,” he told the New York Times.

Cocaine & Meth Addiction

Van Ness dropped out of the University of Arizona in Tucson and earned money as a sex worker to get by and buy cocaine and later methamphetamine, according to CNN. He entered treatment programs for both sex and drug use disorder, but was unsuccessful.

At the age of 25, he found out he was HIV positive. It was “devastating” news, but he’s accepted his place as a “member of the beautiful HIV-positive community.”

Van Ness is now thriving, living his best life and changing lives as the most spirited member of the Fab 5, the stars of Queer Eye. He is off hard drugs, though he still enjoys weed and a sip of alcohol now and then.

Shining In His Purpose

He was nervous to reveal so much about himself, he told the Times. “I’ve had nightmares every night for the past three months because I’m scared to be this vulnerable with people,” he said.

But as he told the Guardian, if he could help move the conversation forward by sharing even his darkest moments, it would give purpose to everything he has been through.

“It occurred to me: what if everything I’ve ever been through was preparing me for this moment—to be strong enough to share this, and to share it on my own terms,” he said. “Part of that for me is to process what’s happened, but the bigger part is that I wanted to do something to move the conversation forward in a meaningful way around HIV/AIDS, and what it is to live with HIV, and to humanize and normalize a lot of the things I talk about.”

Today, Van Ness is even more unapologetic in being himself, having shed his animated persona for a moment to share his truth. USA Today’s David Olivier says that after reading Over the Top, “you’re going to appreciate and understand his gutsy glam even more.” Because of what he went through to get to where he is today.

“I want people to realize that you’re never too broken to be fixed,” he told the Times.

View the original article at thefix.com

24 September 2019
"A Million Little Pieces" Director Sam Taylor-Johnson Talks Addiction

Johnson described how she connected to the controversial addiction memoir in a recent interview.

A Million Little Pieces, written by James Frey, was a harrowing account of addiction that became a huge bestseller once it was anointed by Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. But it wasn’t long before it all came crashing down around Frey, when The Smoking Gun website uncovered a number of untruths in his book.

Now A Million Little Pieces has been adapted into a film, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, who also helmed the big screen adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey. Like millions of others, Johnson read the book in 2003, and it stayed strong in her memory.

“I remember reading it and being really overtaken by it,” she told The Guardian. “I was in the world with him and on the journey.”

Johnson, whose actor-husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars in the film, told Vogue the book “really shook my DNA. The years went by and that feeling never diminished, nor did the experience of re-reading the book…A Million Little Pieces is a book you can laugh and cry with in equal measure. This isn’t just the tale of recovery, it’s a story about hope, life and a community that supports each other through the process of recovery.”

Becoming A Feature Film

There were previous attempts to turn A Million Little Pieces into a film that fell apart, but as Frey told Vogue, when Johnson contacted him, he let her have the rights for free, and gave her free license to make the film however she wished.

“I did visit Hazelden (where I went to rehab) with Sam,” Frey explained. “I showed them all the real locations where the events of the book took place. They met a number of people who were at the treatment center when I was there 26 years ago and talked to them. But for the most part, I was exceedingly hands-off.”

When asked about the Oprah controversy, Johnson said, “It’s obviously something that’s part of its history and that history has been chequered, but it wasn’t anything that we were going to deal with. We did talk about whether we should address it within the movie, but I just wanted to make a film purely of the book, what that meant to me.”

“As a writer, I don’t feel a particular responsibility to do anything but write the best book I can,” Frey told Vogue. “I continue to work in that grey area between fact and fiction. The core of the story is what happened: I went to rehab, I’ve been sober for 26 years, and all my friends but one in that facility are now dead. I often draw the analogy of what I do and what painters do when they paint a self-portrait – it’s never a perfect photographic representation of their own image, and A Million Little Pieces isn’t the prefect photographic representation of my own image. But it’s true to who I am, it’s true to the experience I’ve lived and it’s true to my life.”

Johnson previously had a drinking problem, which is why the book “resonated with me on a personal perspective having lost people very dear to me through troubles with addiction. And the pain of the loss of friends never diminishes really.”

View the original article at thefix.com

26 August 2019
Brandon Lee, Former TV Anchor, Details Surviving Addiction

“My parents never drank, I never saw my parents use drugs. So the question I got was, how did someone like you end up using drugs?” Lee said.

Brandon Lee is a two-time Emmy-winning news anchor who has been in recovery for nearly a decade. He has bravely come forward about his addiction and surviving sexual abuse in his memoir Mascara Boy, and in a CNN interview, Lee spoke out about why he went public about his addictions and trauma, and how he hopes it can help others.

Lee was a TV anchor in Phoenix, New York and Atlanta. He grew up in the affluent community of Orange County, raised by teatotaling parents. Lee told AZ Central, “From the outside world, it looked like I had everything. My parents never drank, I never saw my parents use drugs. So the question I got was, how did someone like you end up using drugs?”

It took many years for Lee to deal with it in therapy, but he was sexually abused for years by both his piano teacher and his soccer coach. “That trauma untreated came out sideways,” he told CNN. “There was a lot of early childhood trauma I needed to address.”

Escaping With Cocaine

Lee started using cocaine at the age of 15, and he explains, “When I was given the opportunity to try a drug like cocaine to escape, I kept chasing that feeling. I kept chasing that escape.”

Once he became an adult, Lee became a successful TV reporter, and he hid his addictions well from the public. “When I was a reporter here in Los Angeles, I was living that double life. I wanted the public to see me as this Emmy-winning news reporter doing a professional job. When the 10 o’clock news was over with that’s when I went to the slums of LA and started using hardcore drugs.”

Lee’s drug abuse finally culminated in an overdose, and the person he was partying with called 911. He wound up on life support, and a kind nurse gave him 10 dollars to take a cab to go to an AA meeting. Lee made the meeting, “and I have been sober ever since that day on February 22, 2010.”

After Lee got sober, he did a documentary on the opioid crisis in Arizona “to try and break the stereotype of what the public perception of a drug addict is.”

Lee then saw the internet troll comments in response to his report, and it broke his heart. He got on the phone to his sponsor, and said, “I’m eight years sober and it’s time for me to break my anonymity.”

“I needed to let the viewers know that the people that they were ripping in my documentary, that I used to be that junkie about a decade ago,” Lee told CNN. “Do they think of me that way? Do they think of me as trash and scum? The most important message we can get out there is that addiction does not discriminate.”

View the original article at thefix.com

1 August 2019
David Carr’s Daughter Pens Memoir About His Life and Addiction

Erin Carr’s memoir details the pain and joy of life with her father, as well as her own experiences with alcohol dependency.

The loss of New York Times columnist and author David Carr, who died in 2015, was felt keenly throughout the journalistic world, as well as by those in recovery impacted by his powerful 2008 memoir The Night of the Gun, which detailed his lengthy and destructive dependency on drugs and alcohol.

But few felt the loss of Carr from their lives like his daughter, documentarian Erin Lee Carr, whose relationship with her father was marked by both complexity – in the depths of his dependency, he put Erin and her twin sister, Megan, into foster care before seeking sobriety – and deep emotional connection.

Carr has written her own memoir, All That You Leave Behind, which details the pain and joy of her life with Carr, as well as her own experiences with alcohol dependency.

Carr, whose work as a documentary director includes 2017’s Mommy Dead and Dearest and the upcoming I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter, said that writing the book was a way of retaining a connection to her father, despite the emotional turmoil it produced.

“I was with him, in a way,” she told NPR. “I really wanted to educate myself in all things David Carr, not just the father which I experienced. But I found it to be so painful to, like, to get access to him in his words in these emails and yet not have him anymore.”

Delving deep into her father’s life in dependency, and by extension, her own life as a young girl during that period, also had its emotional perils. Carr recalled a similar experience while reading her father’s memoir, which reminded her that he had left her and her sister alone in a car while buying drugs. “I sort of choked on the emotion,” she said. “I thought how close I came to not being there anymore.

“It wouldn’t be the last time he would put my life at risk because of drugs and alcohol. We said something in our family: that drugs explain everything, and excuse nothing. So we had to reconcile that he was still the person that left us alone.”

But just as her father would be at the core of some of her darkest experiences, Carr said that he also served as a beacon for her to emerge from her own struggles with alcohol. After relapsing on the six-month anniversary of his death, Carr recalled telling herself that a life in addiction was not the life her father wanted for her.

“I took it very seriously, because I was trying to work towards him, what he did,” she said. “He was part of my decision to get sober, and I’ve been sober since August 23, 2015. And it is crazy what has happened since then. I could not have written this book if I was drinking. There is no way.”

Carr’s life and career have bloomed in remarkable ways since gaining sobriety – in addition to the book, she also completed At the Heart of Gold, about the sex abuse scandal involving former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, for HBO – but her success has a bittersweet patina.

“Just being able to call him and ask him a question – I mean, he was brilliant,” she said. “When I no longer had that, the only voice I could really listen to at the moment was myself. And so I think that he had to leave and pass away in order for me not to rely so heavily on him.

“But… I would completely rather have him be here and me have no work. I think that is the most profound loss I will ever experience, and nothing that has happened outweighs the pain of him being gone.”

View the original article at thefix.com

3 May 2019
Beautiful Boy’s Timothée Chalamet & Nic Sheff Talk Addiction

The duo went on a multi-city tour where they discussed addiction, recovery and their critically-acclaimed film.

Actor Timothée Chalamet and author Nic Sheff went on a multi-city tour last weekend to talk about their new film Beautiful Boy.

The film is based on the memoir Beautiful Boy by New York Times best-selling author David Sheff, and Tweak by his son Nic Sheff—about a family grappling with a young man’s battle with substance use disorder.

Over the weekend, Academy Award-nominated actor, 22-year-old Chalamet, and Nic Sheff sat down for Q&A sessions at screenings of the film in Austin, Dallas, St. Louis and Minneapolis.

The film has so far garnered positive reviews for its honest portrayal of addiction. “I think there’s never been a portrayal of addiction as real-feeling as what [Chalamet] did in this movie,” said Nic at a Q&A in Minneapolis.

Chalamet said he tried “a little of everything” in preparing for his role as young Nic.

“Nic and David’s book helped a lot. Spending time in out-patient and in-patient programs. The key is not to play a drug addict, but to play a human being addicted to drugs,” the actor said at a Q&A in St. Louis.

Spending a lot of time with Nic helped as well, he said. The difference between any other disease and substance use disorder is how life can change in recovery.

“With addiction, when you get sober, it’s not like your life just goes back to the way that it was before. Your life gets so much better than it ever had been,” said Nic.

“It’s a really amazing life that’s possible sober. The fact that addiction is not a death sentence, and that the love that a family has is always there even after everything that we all went through, to have that love in the end is beautiful.”

When asked if he had any advice for parents, and if drug use prevention is really possible, Nic answered that while there’s no definitive answer, what may help is to teach young people to manage stress and educate them on the effects of drug use.

The film also strikes a chord with families across the country who are going through their own—a loved one’s—battles with addiction.

“Addiction knows no class, knows no race, knows no boundaries, and it’s a modern day crisis,” said Chalamet.

“The good news is that there really is a lot of hope. Recovery is possible—not only to recover from this thing, but to actually thrive after addiction,” said Nic.

Read articles by Nic Sheff here.

View the original article at thefix.com

1 November 2018