In her memoir, “Inside Out”, Demi Moore got candid about the disturbing events she experienced in her youth.
Demi Moore was born to Virginia Guynes and Charles Harmon Sr. Her father left her mother before she was born, after only two months of marriage, and Guynes married the man who Moore would later call her dad, saying to Vanity Fair, “My dad was Dan Guynes. He raised me. There is a man who would be considered my biological father who I don’t really have a relationship with.” Dan Guynes took his own life in 1980 at the age of 37 by carbon monoxide poisoning. At the time of his death, he had recently split from Moore’s mother.
Unfortunately, the Guynes’ would later break apart, and Dan would commit suicide.
She went on to tell Vanity Fair, “I feel this man chose the best way for himself. He was in so much pain. I accept and love him for whatever he needed to do.”
Things would get worse for Moore. Her mother was already an alcoholic, but it worsened after her father’s death. She would also attempt suicide multiple times, the first time Moore explained, “I remember 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,”
Later, when Moore was in high school, a much older man began taking an interest in her, and later appeared in her apartment one day and attacked her. Moore wrote that Guynes would later ask that man to help her and her daughter move, and the man would ask Moore, “How does it feel to be w****ed by your mother for $500?”
ET quoted Moore as saying, “For decades, […] I thought of it as something I caused, something I felt obligated to do because this man expected it from me — I had let him expect it from me… I was an easy mark for a predator.” They go onto explain how the incident left her with “issues including addiction, anxiety, eating disorders, insomnia and PTSD”.
Moore and her mother would go onto have a tense relationship, with Moore moving into a hotel to stay close to Guynes as she was battling brain cancer. Guynes passed in 1998.
“I’ve had extraordinary luck in this life: both bad and good. Putting it all down in writing makes me realize how crazy a lot of it has been, how improbable,” Moore said, in her memoir. “But we all suffer, and we all triumph, and we all get to choose how to hold both.”
Sources:
Demi’s Big Moment | Vanity Fair | August 1991
Virginia Guynes, Demi Moore’s Mother: 5 Fast Facts | Heavy.com
