Celebrities react to Demi Moore's revealing memoir Inside Out

Demi Moore is once again baring it all, but this time not on the cover of Vanity Fair or in a big-screen Striptease.

Instead, the actress is sharing her naked truth in her new memoir, Inside Out. The book chronicles Moore’s chaotic childhood and troubled teenage years; her ascent to superstardom and relationship with the media; her romances with Emilio Estevez, Bruce Willis, and Ashton Kutcher; and her struggles with addiction and disordered eating through it all.

The subject of media scrutiny for decades now, Moore has seized this opportunity to use her own voice and tell her own story — which happens to include crossing paths with a whole lot of A-listers, some of whom have engaged with her recollections.

By the mid-’80s, “my appetite for cocaine had escalated into a dependency, and though I would never have called myself an addict, that’s what I had become,” Moore writes. In 1984, she starred in No Small Affair opposite Jon Cryer (making his big-screen debut), who played a teenage photographer in love with Moore’s nightclub singer. “Jon fell for me in real life, too, and lost his virginity to me while we were making that movie. It pains me to think of how callous I was with his feelings — that I stole what could have been such an important and beautiful moment from him. I was sort of losing it right then, and I was definitely not in a place to take care of someone else’s feelings.”

Upon the book’s release, Cryer issued a loving correction. “Well, the good thing about this is she doesn’t have to feel bad about it anymore, because while I’m sure she was totally justified making that assumption based on my my [sic] skill level (and the stunned look on my face at the time), I had actually lost my virginity in high school,” the actor tweeted. “But she’s right about the other part, I was over the moon for her during a very troubled time in her life. I have nothing but affection for her and not a regret in the world.”

The celebrity cameos don’t stop there. A member of the Brat Pack in the ’80s (though she notes in the book that she did not appreciate the nickname, like some other members of the pack), Moore recounts her time making films like 1985’s St. Elmo’s Fire — “the movie that changed my life,” she calls it, because the film’s producers and director Joel Schumacher insisted she enter rehab before shooting began — alongside Estevez, Rob Lowe, and others.

On the flip side of Cryer’s clarification, Moore herself responds to some other Hollywood memoirs in Inside Out — Lowe’s, for instance. “Memory — especially memory clouded by drugs — is a funny thing,” she writes. “In his own memoir, Rob suggests that we had some kind of hot-and-heavy romance; I can vaguely recall one ill-advised late night together, but I’m grateful to him for the complimentary descriptions of our youth.”

Lowe is complimentary of his St. Elmo’s costar still. Appearing on The View days after the release of Inside Out, he called Moore “a huge inspiration to me” on his own journey to sobriety. “It was the ‘80s, so were all doing our thing. I just remember thinking, ‘If that girl can get sober, anybody can.’”

Lowe isn’t the only celebrity in whose tell-all Moore was surprised to find herself. When appearing in “my one and only play in New York,” The Early Girl, Off Broadway, “my agents found me an apartment at one of the first Trump apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue,” she writes. “I threw myself a twenty-third birthday party there, and I dared to invite Andy Warhol, whom I’d met one night at Indochine. I was amazed to read years later in The Andy Warhol Diaries that not only had Andy been to see the play, but felt that he had ‘got Demi Moore to invite me to her wedding.’”

That wedding would have been her planned one to Estevez, which Moore postponed before the couple broke up entirely. The pair remained friends, however, and not long after calling it quits, Moore joined Estevez at the premiere of his 1987 film Stakeout — where she met Bruce Willis.

Her account of the night they met plays out like a true Hollywood romance. “My impression was, he’s kind of a jerk,” she writes of their very first interaction. But as the evening went on, “Bruce was so gallant — in his own boisterous way, a real gentleman.” He got her number and she left, driving home along the quiet, moonlit Pacific Coast Highway, “and then I could swear I heard my name in the wind,” she recalls. “It was a stretch limousine in the next lane, with Bruce Willis and his buddies poking up through the open sunroof, waving and shouting, ‘Hey, Demi!’”

Within four months, they were married and Moore was pregnant with their first daughter, Rumer. After two more daughters and just over a decade of marriage, they were separated, and in 2000 they divorced. “It’s a funny thing to say, but I’m very proud of our divorce,” the actress writes. “It wasn’t easy at first, but we managed to move the heart of our relationship, the heart of what created our family, into something new that gave the girls a loving, supportive environment with both parents.”

For a period following their breakup, “I experienced the most conventional family dynamic I’d ever known in those years,” when Moore was a stay-at-home mom and Willis continued to work. “That Bruce was no longer my husband was irrelevant because he was the active father of my children; we felt more connected than we did before the divorce.”

Willis didn’t need to tweet anything (not that he ever would) about Moore’s memoir; his actions spoke louder than words when he showed support by attending his ex-wife’s book launch party with their daughters and his current wife, Emma Heming, pictured above. (The event was hosted by another celebrity pal, Gwyneth Paltrow, and we can only guess that the conscious-uncoupling pioneer would approve of Moore and Willis’ harmonious split.)

Moore’s next marriage came to a less amicable end. The actress doesn’t hold back on the details of her relationship with Ashton Kutcher, to whom she was married from 2005 to 2013. It was another charmed beginning, and even though the news of their romance sparked a brutal media frenzy, “I didn’t care,” Moore writes. “I’d never been so happy in my life.”

The relationship faced hardship, however, including the devastating loss of a pregnancy. And as time went on and Kutcher became “less and less present,” the actress “went into contortions to try to fit the mold of the woman he wanted his wife to be.” So when he told her he had a fantasy of having a threesome, Moore consented. “I wanted to show him how great and fun I could be,” she writes. She also began drinking again in an effort to please her husband, whom she remembers saying, “I don’t know if alcoholism is a real thing — I think it’s all about moderation.” After hearing that, “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.”

She slipped back into substance abuse, and after painfully cutting herself off from Vicodin, upon which she became dependent after having a dental surgery, “he did not offer me any reinforcement or compassion,” Moore recalls. “I felt like he was angry with me for having this problem in the first place: you made your bed; now you have to lie in it.”

It eventually appeared in the tabloids that Kutcher had cheated on Moore, but “because we had brought a third party into our relationship, Ashton said, that blurred the lines and, to some extent, justified what he’d done.” Looking back, “I think all of this was his way of trying to get out of our marriage,” Moore writes. (They separated in 2011 and finalized their divorce in 2013.) “Every one of his actions was saying, Please don’t love me. But, unfortunately for both of us, I did.”

Kutcher has not publicly shared any explicit response or reaction to Moore’s book, and a rep for Kutcher has not replied to EW’s request for comment. But on the day of release, he cryptically tweeted, “I was about to push the button on a really snarky tweet. Then I saw my son, daughter, and wife and I deleted it.”

Less than an hour later, he tweeted, “For truth text me,” along with a phone number with an Iowa area code. Texts to the number result in an auto-reply from Kutcher explaining that the texter should fill out a form at a provided link in order to correspond with him further. After submitting information on the form, users are welcomed into Kutcher’s Community with another automated reply (ending in “This is what the lawyers are making me text you. Booo”).

EW’s texts to Kutcher’s Community number have, in the last four days, yielded a video greeting from the star along with some text keywords that have prompted more phone numbers (linked to other celebrities, including Diddy and the Jonas Brothers), a link to a “cool company,” and some generally positive reflections/affirmations. In short, there has been no mention of Moore or her account of her marriage to Kutcher, or anything that might be construed as his “truth” regarding their relationship. (Which of course he never promised, but many fans who tweeted back at him clearly assumed, based on the timing and phrasing of the invitation to text, that that would be the content of his replies.)

Regardless of whether Kutcher ever does say anything, or any other celebrities who appear in the pages of Inside Out tweet a correction or respond on a talk show, Moore has presented her own, raw side of “the story of how I learned to surrender” in black and white. “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,” she asserts at the end of her book. “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.”

Inside Out is available now.

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• St. Elmo’s Fire actors look back at a movie that defined a generation

• Jon Cryer denies Demi Moore took his virginity but admits he was ‘over the moon for her’