Behind the blockbuster roles and red carpets, Josh Brolin’s new memoir peels back a life shaped by fear, chaos, and a brutal kind of love. He writes of a childhood where his wildlife-conservationist mother sicced cougars and coyotes on her boys as a “lesson,” and of a young man who numbed himself early with marijuana, acid, and alcohol. For years he romanticized dying at 55, the age his mother never lived past, as if a short, hard life was all he deserved.

Reaching 56, sober and present, shattered that illusion. The moment that changed everything came in 2013, when he stumbled hungover to his 99-year-old grandmother’s deathbed, reeking of alcohol, and saw clearly what he was throwing away. Tough love from stepmother Barbra Streisand, a decade of sobriety, and the quiet acceptance of aging have replaced bravado. Today, Brolin sees each year not as borrowed time, but as proof he escaped the script that once seemed written for him.