Demi Moore, Beyond the Tabloid Stories

Demi Moore, 56, has been so long in the spotlight, many of us feel like we know her already: her tabloid-fodder romances (Bruce Willis! Ashton Kutcher!), her wild fame in the ‘80s and ‘90s with films such as St. Elmo's Fire, Ghost and A Few Good Men; her perfect figure, famously bared on Vanity Fair's cover during pregnancy. But in Inside Out, Moore's new memoir released today, she offers fans a candid view of her career, loves and family life, including the depth of her body-image issues (despite having that body); the strain of dealing with a drug-abusing, absolutely unfit mother; a deep insecurity that contributed to dysfunctional relationships; and painful periods of estrangement from both her mother and her daughters.

Ain't fame grand?

Harper Collins

You may have heard some of the more salacious stories related to all of the above, but they distract from the more hopeful message of the book: Moore is a woman who — despite her beauty and fame — has had a lot of pain in her life, yet managed to find a kind of calm and confidence in her middle age. She's been able to relinquish, she writes, “the narrative I believed … that I was unworthy and contaminated.”

More from the actress's memoir:

She tackled her drug problems early (then later) in her career. She's thankful for the producers of St. Elmo's Fire (1985), her breakout movie, who demanded she get sober. A counselor stayed with Moore day and night during the filming, she reports, and the resulting many years of sobriety are partly why “St. Elmo's will always be the movie that changed my life.” When her marriage to Kutcher (who was 25 to her 40 when they met) unraveled, she reached another low but went into treatment programs, mental and physical, and got back on track.