Josh Brolin’s new memoir, “From Under the Truck,” is not your typical celebrity autobiography.

For starters, it’s told in a non-linear fashion, moving back and forth between reflections over the years, on his childhood and various points in his long and eventful career, from his breakthrough in ‘The Goonies’ to adult milestones like ‘No Country for Old Men’. and “Milk.” Furthermore, the book is remarkably candid about Brolin’s missteps and highlights, including a discussion of a decades-long battle with substance abuse and charmingly rendered gossip about his fellow celebrities. Brolin also frequently returns to the subject of his challenging upbringing. Here are four tips from Brolin’s “From Under the Truck.”

Turbulent years: “I was born to drink,” Brolin writes early in the book. “I was born to drink.” His mother, Jane Agee Cameron, he writes, was a heavy drinker who helped him understand what adult life would be like. “My mother drank exactly like me, and I was raised to be a man and drink like the male equivalent of my mother,” he continues. Later in the book he describes life on the set of ‘No Country for Old Men’, where he is a regular at the bars around town, to the extent that a crew member hands out T-shirts with the slogan ‘I BLAME JOSH BROLIN’ and “a photo of my drunken face that someone took on one of those debaucherous weekends – wearing a cowboy hat and a big, stupid smile.” On set, he describes his reflection on his mother, and the chaos she left in her wake, after waking up just before noon: “I think about my mother and how she held that .22 rifle on her boyfriend because she didn’t wanted him to leave.”

Perhaps the book’s most moving passage is a scene at the New York Film Critics Circle, where Brolin won the Best Supporting Actor award in 2008 for his role in “Milk.” (He would be nominated for the Oscar that year, which he lost to the late Heath Ledger for “The Dark Knight.”) Brolin describes sitting in a hotel lounge before accepting his award, getting drunk on wine to try to to endure a hangover. “The wine increased my exhaustion, and yet the alcohol always won and brought back that warrior’s fuel. Be a damn warrior, the wine whispered to me.

Brolin accidentally insults Robert De Niro before going to the awards ceremony, perhaps the biggest moment of his career. “The guy from ‘The Goonies’ made up for it,” Brolin realizes, but he sabotages himself by delivering a profane and rude speech castigating his perceived haters. “Words like bastard And piece of shit rolled off my tongue into a growing roar of shock and disgust,” Brolin recalls. After returning to his seat, Brolin meets the eyes of his castmate Sean Penn: “Sean smiled kindly, like your brother would as you’re being wheeled back to a traumatic surgery.”

Recordings of “The Goonies” and “No Country”: The two films Brolin spends the most time on are his first film and the film that revived his adult career. “The Goonies” gives rise to sweet and somewhat melancholic reflections on staying at a motor inn in Oregon with the rest of the young cast and getting encouragement from producer Steven Spielberg (“He smiled a little once. He said I’m loose had to stay. I’ll remember that.’) The ‘No Country’ shoot is a rawer affair, marked by physical setbacks – including a broken collarbone suffered in a car accident in Los Angeles. (Brolin allows the injury to “heal naturally” without setting it, and is relieved that the fact that his “No Country” character suffers a shoulder injury still makes him suitable for the role.)

During the filming of the Coens’ film, Brolin quickly becomes friends with Joel Coen, with whom he gossips about their careers and “about how Fran (Coen’s wife Frances McDormand) won’t appear in the press”; his relationship with costar Tommy Lee Jones is more arm’s length, though Brolin views him with admiration. “He is a cowboy at his best,” Brolin writes, “the most cowboy I have ever seen on film.”

Maintaining friendships: Brolin sometimes writes alludingly about the many, many A-listers he’s met during his career, including Joaquin Phoenix, with whom he has a beer after wrapping “Inherent Vice” (on Phoenix winning an Oscar for “Joker,” he writes, “wow, how ironic: to be a famous actor playing someone who is invisible and almost invisible and becoming more and more famous for it), and an unnamed actor-director, who insults Brolin while drunk at Chateau Marmont tried in vain to make amends through the director’s agent.

However, other relationships are more lasting. Oliver Stone, who directed Brolin as George W. Bush in ‘W.’, seems big enough to get a special section recapping what might be a more extended version of a strange encounter about the role. (Stone says: ‘You’ve been through a lot. I can see that. (pause) I meditate.” And Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the novel on which “No Country for Old Men” is based, is a close friend until his death in 2023; afterwards, Brolin visits his house to look at his belongings. He regrets asking McCarthy, whom he revered, to sign his typewriter: ‘It was a question that trivialized that friendship. Make collectors pay a lot of money for dirty underwear that might contain atoms of genius.’

Health and family setbacks and triumphs: Brolin is tireless in describing the challenges he and his family have faced; in one harrowing chapter, he is stabbed by a stranger in Costa Rica in 2013; he believes that the fact that the knife hit his belly button prevented it from hitting any vital organs. And in 2006, he writes, he briefly thought his son Trevor might have died after going missing; it turns out he has just been briefly hospitalized for alcohol poisoning.

But Brolin is just as candid about his love for his family; in his stepmother Barbra Streisand, for example, he sees a toughness and directness, including a rare willingness to confront him about his substance use. “I have always liked tough women,” he writes. “It’s an Oedipal thing.” And he writes with gratitude both about his defiant mother, whose portrait he keeps on his desk, and about his children: “I’m grateful,” he says, “that everyone seems to be exactly where they should be, even my mother. mother on the desk here in the house.

‘From Under the Truck’ is available for purchase now.