Hollywood royalty and household name Demi Moore opened up about the trauma of a late miscarriage, suffered during her relationship with now ex Ashton Kutcher, in a recent profile with the New York Times. The interview comes ahead of the September 24th release of Inside Out, a memoir which Moore had been commissioned to write back in 2010 – however, as she explained to NYT, it was only in the last two years that work on the book began in earnest.
Demi spoke candidly about the dark days which followed her miscarriage, revealing that the experience pushed her back to the substance abuse which had coloured her early adulthood. ‘Part of my life was clearly unravelling’, Moore said, detailing how she turned to alcohol and later Vicodin after blaming herself for the loss of her pregnancy. Conceived shortly after getting together with Kutcher in 2003, the couple were expecting a little girl – already named Chaplin Ray, according to Moore.
The pair married in 2005, and Demi explains that they sought fertility treatment in a bid to become pregnant again before finally splitting in 2011. ‘I had no career, no relationship’, she explained of that time; NYT reports that Demi was also lacking family support, after her ‘hedonistic behaviour’ prompted all three of her daughters – Rumer, Tallulah and Scout Willis – to sever contact.
But, as the saying goes, when it rains it pours – and Demi began experiencing severe health problems around the same time. While she wasn’t explicit about her precise diagnosis in interview, she did say that ‘Something was going on, including my organs slowly shutting down […] the root was a very heavy viral load'.
Fast forward a little more than half a decade, and Demi’s back in good health and pleased to have repaired relationships with her children. Her daughters have all been largely supportive of the memoir, with NYT reporting that they were each given manuscripts at various stages (as well as the opportunity to request changes, which none of them did). ‘It’s challenging because she’s making this amazing effort to put out the most vulnerable moments of her life,’ said Scout, admitting that it’s not been an entirely straightforward emotional experience: ‘It just so happens that it also coincides with some of the most challenging and traumatic times of mine’. The catharsis of the memoir for Moore hasn’t escaped her friend Gwyneth Paltrow either – she explained how the book has gone hand-in-hand with ‘[Demi’s] healing journey – physically, mentally, emotionally. It's no accident that it's all been in alignment and all happened at the same time.’
We can’t wait to read the story in its entirety – and in the meantime, it’s hard not to admire Demi’s fierce honesty and bravery in opening up her darkest moments to the world. The unapologetic account, as yet unreleased, is already sparking conversations about subjects normally thought of as deeply private: from substance abuse to miscarriage, sexual assault to family relationships, there’s profound power in reclaiming one’s own narrative.