By Annie Martin
Moore first became sober in her 20s but struggled with addiction again in her 40s. She recommitted to sobriety in her 50s.
“In retrospect, what I realized is that when I opened the door [again], it was just giving my power away,” the star said of her relapse.
“I guess I would think of it like this: It was really important to me to have natural childbirth because I didn’t want to miss a moment. And with that I experienced pain,” she added. “So part of being sober is, I don’t want to miss a moment of life, of that texture, even if that means being in — some pain.”
Moore spoke to Harper’s Bazaar ahead of the release of her memoir, Inside Out. She recounts her mom’s substance abuse issues in the book, including an instance where she helped revive her mom from an overdose as a child.
“The next thing I remember is using my fingers, the small fingers of a child, to dig the pills my mother had tried to swallow out of her mouth while my father held it open and told me what to do,” Moore wrote. “Something very deep inside me shifted then, and it never shifted back. My childhood was over.”
Moore said in the interview that Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah, her daughters with ex-husband Bruce Willis, helped her implement change in her own life.
“My daughters offered me an opportunity to start to change the generational pattern. To be able to break the cycles,” she said.
Moore previously discussed her addiction and recovery while accepting the Woman of the Year Award from the Peggy Albrecht Friendly House in October.
“I was spiraling down a path of real self-destruction and no matter what success I had I just never felt good enough,” the actress said, according to Variety. “I had absolutely no value for myself and this self-destructive path, it really quickly brought me to a real crisis point.”
“It wasn’t clear at the time, maybe it was divine intervention, but two people who I barely knew stepped up and took a stand for me and presented me with an opportunity,” she recalled. “It gave me a chance to redirect the course of my life before I destroyed everything.”
Inside Out: A Memoir will be published Sept. 24. Moore will next appear in a USA Network series adaptation of the Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World, co-starring Harry Lloyd, Alden Ehrenreich and Jessica Brown Findlay.