By Nathan Smith
MEMOIR
From Under the Truck: A Memoir
Josh Brolin
HarperCollins, $34.99
“Aren’t you an alcoholic?” Barbra Streisand’s typically “no bullshit” response to her stepson’s request for a glass of wine is one of the most telling moments in Josh Brolin’s rough-edged memoir. In what he describes as an “un-celebrity memoir”, Brolin recalls visiting his father, fellow actor James Brolin, who had recently married the storied singer. After acknowledging that yes, he was an alcoholic, Brolin told his new stepmother: “I like red wine.” Looking back, Brolin writes: “I was born to drink.”
Streisand reminded Brolin of his own fiery and forceful mother, actress Jane Cameron, who died in 1995. Toughness is a through line and a prized ideal in From Under the Truck, which embraces a disjointed style to capture the chaos of his troubled life. From past diary entries to reimagined dialogue, Brolin is unfailingly honest in his self-examination, but the result is largely haphazard.
Josh Brolin with his stepmother, Barbra Streisand, and father James in 2019.Credit: Getty Images
He has enjoyed an acclaimed second act in his film career – thanks to roles in No Country for Old Men, Milk and Dune – but his start in the movie business was less than ideal. After starring as a teenager in the 1985 adventure movie The Goonies, his career quickly unravelled as alcoholism and anger eroded his sense of self-worth.
His dysfunctional upbringing was marked by his mother’s dependence on alcohol and her doomed attempts to domesticate wild animals at home. A wildlife activist, she allowed coyotes, mountain lions and even a wolf to roam around the Brolin family farm.His father, meanwhile, came and went, “floating in the jet stream of his own celluloid-perpetuated world”, Brolin writes.
Josh Brolin in the 2007 film No Country For Old Men.
Across clipped chapters that move back and forth in time, the 56-year-old admits to his own share of reckless and destructive behaviour. This included acid trips at 13 while running with a gang that stole cars and liquor, and manic episodes walking shirtless and shoeless through New York.
Brolin began to turn his life around in the 1990s, when the first of his four children was born. Riding a motorbike, with its feeling of freeing the restless spirit, helped quell heavier substance abuse. With help from director Quentin Tarantino, Brolin scored a part in the acclaimed 2007 film No Country for Old Men. Roles in Dune and the Avengers franchise followed.
The book also looks back on Brolin’s friendship with the celebrated novelist Cormac McCarthy, who told him that he didn’t know why he wrote the way he did: “I just sit down, and it comes, and I type it.” Brolin once asked McCarthy to sign his typewriter, a memory that gives him some disquiet. “It’s tough being weak – human – whatever you want to call it,” he writes. “It’s embarrassing as all hell.”
From Under the Truck is as much a reckoning for celebrity and trauma as it is an elegy for his mother, who resurfaces again and again. But Brolin’s attempts at capturing past failures and the disorder of his early life often feel like first drafts. His search for epiphanic conclusions – such as on death, substance abuse and kinship – never quite reach the transformative potential he strives for.
While noble for its honesty and admirable for its literary aspirations, From Under the Truck doesn’t quite unravel the celebrity memoir genre. It really only highlights the limits of one jaded actor, vainly searching for answers.
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