Throughout this candid and sincere memoir, Demi Moore often wonders How did I get here? How did a little girl with a lazy eye from Roswell, New Mexico, who moved more times and been to more schools than you have fingers and toes, end up being the highest paid actress in Hollywood at one point? At age 50, when her career had been put on pause, her latest marriage had disintegrated, and her children were not speaking to her, she wondered how she had fallen to such depths, especially after soaring to such heights. Moore decided to look back into her past and shift through the wreckage for some answers.

INSIDE OUT opens with “The Guest House,” a poem by Rumi, in which Moore reminds us, “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” to set the tone for her story of superlative highs and desperate lows.

The book is divided into three sections --- “Survival,” “Success” and “Surrender” --- and in the first, Moore examines her childhood. Born in Roswell, New Mexico, to teenagers Virginia and Danny Guynes, her early life was marred by her volatile parents’ constant fighting, breaking up and the inevitable move, replete with new schools and trying to assimilate, only for them to reconcile until the next drunken brawl. Her father, while charming, was constantly getting into scrapes caused by low-level cons he tried to run, which usually ended poorly and required the family to move yet again. Her mother was more mercurial. She seemed like a caring parent, but deep down was still a child herself and didn’t appear suited to be someone else’s caregiver.

"Moore’s frank and forthright memoir demonstrates the pains of her past and how she shouldered them without devolving into self-pity. Instead she details her traumatic past as a reminder and bid to understand behaviors so as not to repeat them ever again."

All this turmoil made young Demi feel unsafe in her own home, especially after she was raped at 15 by her mother’s then-boyfriend, who claimed he gave her mother $500 for her: “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.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Moore moved out at 16 and married an older musician three years later. She was desperate to get away from her family and their drama, and determined to create the family she didn’t have, despite still being a child herself. The dissolution of her first marriage coincided with the early ascent of her acting career, first with a job on the soap opera “General Hospital” and then the film Blame It on Rio with Michael Caine. But as her star began to rise, so did her use of alcohol and drugs. She soon realized that this behavior was not conducive to a successful career or a happy life.

It was all down to Moore, so she had to straighten up if she wanted to continue in Hollywood. She got sober and was able to focus more on acting, and the roles kept coming. During St. Elmo’s Fire, she met and became engaged to actor Emilio Estevez (Martin Sheen’s son and Charlie Sheen’s brother), which would end after he cheated with an ex. Other movies followed, About Last Night and One Crazy Summer, and with them came increasing body image issues. Never one to shy away from a nude scene, Moore began to anticipate the studio’s negative comments about her body, and would restrict her eating and work out like a fiend so she would fit the Hollywood “norm.”

A chance meeting with actor Bruce Willis led to a whirlwind courtship, a quickie Vegas marriage and, almost as quickly, motherhood. Willis’ star was on the rise, as he just stepped into the Die Hard movie franchise that would catapult him from TV personality to worldwide mega-action star. Three daughters followed in quick succession. Moore kept acting throughout, even agreeing to start shooting Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men a month after the birth of her second daughter, Scout. But it was clear early on that Willis, while a loving and attentive father, was rather ambivalent about marriage in general. Towards the end of their decade-long union, her husband became “just someone with whom you negotiate logistics.” Moore retreated to the family’s home in Hailey, Idaho, and decided to put Hollywood on hold while she cared for her girls.

While having dinner with friends as she was promoting Charlie’s Angels, Moore met actor Ashton Kutcher, 15 years her junior, which the press never failed to mention during their entire time together. (To that point, Moore herself points out that there’s a larger age difference between her ex-husband and his new wife, and yet, no one ever says anything about that.) After dating for two years, she and Kutcher married and even conceived a child (sadly, she lost the baby, a girl they named Chaplin Ray). Despite a solicitous beginning, the marriage ended after Kutcher cheated and decided he didn’t want to be married any longer. Taking this much harder than the dissolution of her last marriage, as she believed Kutcher to be the “love of her life,” Moore spiraled back into old habits, ending with a near-death experience. It took her revisiting her rock bottom before deciding to get well and reestablish her relationships with her daughters.

Moore’s frank and forthright memoir demonstrates the pains of her past and how she shouldered them without devolving into self-pity. Instead she details her traumatic past as a reminder and bid to understand behaviors so as not to repeat them ever again. Her motives for the book are clear: “There are two reasons I wanted to tell this story, the story of how I learned to surrender. First, because it’s mine. It doesn’t belong to the tabloids or my mom or the men I’ve married or the people who’ve loved or hated my movies or even my children. My story is mine alone; I’m the only one who was there for all of it, and I decided to claim the power to tell it on my own terms. The second reason is that even though it’s mine, maybe part of the story is yours, too…. But we all suffer, and we all triumph, and we all get to choose how we hold both.”

Some readers might crave more behind-the-scenes stories of Moore’s movies, and maybe she’ll write that one day. But INSIDE OUT is a heartfelt account of a woman trying to reconcile her past and be content with the space she occupies in the world. She finally knows how she got here.