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I was 11 and sitting alone in the guest room of the penthouse apartment that my parents owned in the San Remo, on Central Park West, when my world changed entirely.
I had flown to New York with my mother, Demi Moore, and her partner at the time, Ashton Kutcher, for an event the night before. I had worn a mink capelet—I felt awfully grown-up and was very pleased with myself—and I wanted to see if my outfit had made the party pages of any of the style websites. So I opened my laptop and went to the usual places (this was the heyday of Perez Hilton; celebrity kids were fair game), and there I was in my tweenage awkwardness, standing beside my famously beautiful mom. Then I found my way to the comments, hundreds of them, the words just burning off the screen. Wow, she looks deformed. Look at her man jaw—she’s like an ugly version of her dad. Her mother must be so disappointed. I remember how deadly silent the room was. I sat reading for two hours, believing that I had stumbled onto a truth about myself that no one had told me because they were trying to protect me. And for years afterward, protecting people right back, I told no one. I just lived with the silent certainty of my own ugliness.
The first time I entered psychiatric treatment, at age 20, my medical information found its way to the Daily Mail. Back then the choice to tell my story was taken from me. Now, nine years and a whole lot of therapy later, I get to make that decision myself. But because I am Bruce and Demi’s daughter, I still wonder if it’s okay to talk at all. There’s the nepo-baby factor, of course: the awareness that if I weren’t their daughter, maybe few people outside my tight circle of family and friends would care about what I have to say. And the fact that, although I believe that everyone’s suffering is real, I have always felt afraid of looking like a spoiled, insensitive, whining jerk. I was reared to keep my mouth shut. It wasn’t exactly cloak-and-dagger—my baby photos were shot by Annie Leibovitz, after all—but I was taught at a young age to do whatever I could to avoid the conversation. My sisters and I learned to lie flat on the floor of the van under our jackets, to sneak out the back doors of restaurants. There was a single photo lab in Sun Valley, Idaho, where we were permitted to get film developed, because my dad had an NDA there. Even now, when I told my mom that I wanted to write about myself for Vogue, the first thing she said was, “Who approved this?” Of course that old instinct of hers to protect me is alive, even if one of the things I’ve learned through treatment is that no one is coming—not even my big, strong dad, an action hero onscreen and in my childish imagination. Only I can protect myself.
My family announced in early 2022 that Bruce Willis was suffering from aphasia, a brain-mediated inability to speak or to understand speech, and we learned earlier this year that that symptom was a feature of frontotemporal dementia, a progressive neurological disorder that chips away at his cognition and behavior day by day. But I’ve known that something was wrong for a long time. It started out with a kind of vague unresponsiveness, which the family chalked up to Hollywood hearing loss: “Speak up! Die Hard messed with Dad’s ears.” Later that unresponsiveness broadened, and I sometimes took it personally. He had had two babies with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought he’d lost interest in me. Though this couldn’t have been further from the truth, my adolescent brain tortured itself with some faulty math: I’m not beautiful enough for my mother, I’m not interesting enough for my father.
I admit that I have met Bruce’s decline in recent years with a share of avoidance and denial that I’m not proud of. The truth is that I was too sick myself to handle it. For the last four years, I have suffered from anorexia nervosa, which I’ve been reluctant to talk about because, after getting sober at age 20, restricting food has felt like the last vice that I got to hold on to. When I was 25, I was admitted to a residential treatment facility in Malibu to address the depression that I had lived with through my adolescence. It was a largely therapeutic experience; for the first time, I grieved the 15-year-old misfit me, the ugly duckling. I was also diagnosed with ADHD and started on stimulant medication, which was transformative. I felt smart for the first time, but I also started to enjoy the appetite-suppressant side effect of the meds. I saw a way to banish the awkward adolescent in favor of a flighty little pixie.
And like so many people with eating disorders, my sense of myself went haywire. There’s an unhealthy deliciousness at the beginning of losing weight rapidly. People are like, Oh wow! And then quickly it turns to, Are you okay? My friends and family were terrified, and I dismissed it. They’d say, Is this the ADHD medication? I was very protective of my medication, and I rationalized it by telling myself that it was helping me to focus, which in turn was helping me to build a life outside of how I looked. An eating disorders therapist would tell me later, the smaller you are, the bigger you feel. How twisted is that?
While I was wrapped up in my body dysmorphia, flaunting it on Instagram, my dad was quietly struggling. All kinds of cognitive testing was being conducted, but we didn’t have an acronym yet. I had managed to give my central dad-feeling canal an epidural; the good feelings weren’t really there, the bad feelings weren’t really there. But I remember a moment when it hit me painfully: I was at a wedding in the summer of 2021 on Martha’s Vineyard, and the bride’s father made a moving speech. Suddenly I realized that I would never get that moment, my dad speaking about me in adulthood at my wedding. It was devastating. I left the dinner table, stepped outside, and wept in the bushes. And yet I remained focused on my body. By the spring of 2022, I weighed about 84 pounds. I was always freezing. I was calling mobile IV teams to come to my house, and I couldn’t walk in my Los Angeles neighborhood because I was afraid of not having a place to sit down and catch my breath.
The other night, I lay in bed thinking to myself, with an ache in my heart, What if my dad had been his full self and saw me at that size? What would he have done? I’d like to think that he wouldn’t have let it happen. Whereas my sisters and my mother have these extensive tool kits—lots of psycho-education and interpersonal skills—my dad has never been so interested in root causes, in close examination. Maybe he’s a stereotypical father of a certain generation in that way, a doer who, if he had understood, might have scooped me up and said, “This is ending now.” His style has always been to plug the leak even if he’s not sure why the leak is happening. Certainly there are benefits to examination, but there’s a beauty in his way, and I don’t think I noticed it until he was no longer capable of it.
In fact what happened was that in June of last year, my boyfriend, who was by then my fiancé, dumped me, and my family stepped in as they had done before and sent me to Driftwood Recovery, in Texas. I was introduced to a variety of therapies, my medication was retooled, and I was given a new diagnosis: borderline personality disorder, an illness that impairs the ability to regulate emotions and find stability in relationships. By the time I left Texas, in October, I felt a lot better. I realized that what I wanted more than harmony with my body was harmony with my family—to no longer worry them, to bring a levity to my sisters and my parents. An emaciated body wouldn’t do that. I had felt the weight of people worrying about me for years, and that put me on my knees.
Most of my clothes are too small now, and in the morning, as I go through my closet, I have to resist the temptation to linger on that and urge myself to move on. Recovery is probably lifelong, but I now have the tools to be present in all facets of my life, and especially in my relationship with my dad. I can bring him an energy that’s bright and sunny, no matter where I’ve been. In the past I was so afraid of being destroyed by sadness, but finally I feel that I can show up and be relied upon. I can savor that time, hold my dad’s hand, and feel that it’s wonderful. I know that trials are looming, that this is the beginning of grief, but that whole thing about loving yourself before you can love somebody else—it’s real.
Every time I go to my dad’s house, I take tons of photos—of whatever I see, the state of things. I’m like an archaeologist, searching for treasure in stuff that I never used to pay much attention to. I have every voicemail from him saved on a hard drive. I find that I’m trying to document, to build a record for the day when he isn’t there to remind me of him and of us. These days, my dad can be reliably found on the first floor of the house, somewhere in the big open plan of the kitchen-dining-living room, or in his office. Thankfully, dementia has not affected his mobility. That office has always been a kind of window into what he’s most interested in at any given moment. Recently I found a scrap of paper there on which he had written, simply, “Michael Jordan.” I wish I knew what he was thinking. (In any case, I took it!) The room is filled with the knicknacks he has collected: vintage toy cars, coins, rocks, objects made of brass. He likes things that feel heavy in the hand, that he can spin around in his fingers. There’s always music playing. My dad is an excellent musician in his own right, an accomplished harmonica player, and he loves his oldies, which span genres from Patsy Cline to Nina Simone. The music I associate with him the most—in many respects the soundtrack of my childhood—is the Coasters. Songs like “Yakety Yak,” “Little Egypt,” and “Down in Mexico.” I’ve always called my dad “Daddio,” which comes from a lyric in the Coasters song “Charlie Brown”—although as a kid I thought it was the other way around and that the band had written a song about my father. I remember these songs playing in the kitchen as my dad made breakfast. He was the Jiffy corn cake king turning out stacks and stacks of them, pouring cold milk on his while we girls bathed ours in syrup.
He still knows who I am and lights up when I enter the room. (He may always know who I am, give or take the occasional bad day. One difference between FTD and Alzheimer’s dementia is that, at least early in the disease, the former is characterized by language and motor deficits, while the latter features more memory loss.) I keep flipping between the present and the past when I talk about Bruce: he is, he was, he is, he was. That’s because I have hopes for my father that I’m so reluctant to let go of. I’ve always recognized elements of his personality in me, and I just know that we’d be such good friends if only there were more time. He was cool and charming and slick and stylish and sweet and a little wacky—and I embrace all that. Those are the genes I inherited from him. Having grown up a Jersey boy with a scarcity mentality, he loved to enjoy the life he had made for himself. He was an indulger. Sometimes we’d go to a restaurant and he’d order one of everything on the menu just to have a bite of it all. He always loved a cozy couch with his feet up. Can you be 10 percent more comfortable? I think he asked himself that every day.
And now that I’m feeling better I ask myself, How can I make him more comfortable? It wasn’t easy growing up in such a famous family, struggling as I did to find a patch of light through the long shadows my parents cast. But more and more often I feel like I’m standing in that light. In April, my older sister Rumer had a baby girl, Louetta, and Bruce and Demi became grandparents. There’s this little creature changing by the hour, and there’s this thing happening with my dad that can shift so quickly and unpredictably. It feels like a unique and special time in my family, and I’m just so glad to be here for it.