There’s a moment in Josh Brolin’s raw, often self-deprecating memoir “From Under the Truck” when the actor, shirtless, shoeless and cripplingly hungover wandering Manhattan’s Upper West Side, encounters Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s 1992 and Hoffman is freshly sober, embarking on his brilliant career on screen and stage, while Brolin is at one of his periodic lows, riddled with too much booze and too many drugs. The two men know each other vaguely — Brolin met Hoffman’s mother at plays upstate, and she connected them — but their lives follow different trajectories. The meeting is very uncomfortable, especially because both men have taken the full measure of the other.

“There is sweat on my bare chest,” Brolin writes suggestively. ‘I look again at the stairwell of the subway, but he is already gone. I know he’s sober. I am no more. He knows that too. I could tell by the way he looked at me as someone who just didn’t understand.’

Thinking back to that exchange decades later, Brolin becomes sad. Hoffman died of a drug overdose in 2014, about a year after Brolin kicked his addiction. The two men had stayed in touch, and Hoffman had talked to Brolin about directing him in a stage version of Kenneth Lonergan’s “Hold On to Me Darling.” Brolin knew Hoffman was using again.

“I said, ‘If you ever want to talk about this shit, let me know.’ And he was dead a month and a half or two months later. It was terrible. This was a man who became all of our favorite actors. He was at the helm, man. That was him It. He was the most talented of us all and lived his sobriety like a badge of honor. It meant a lot to him.”

Hoffman’s death is just one of many painful memories in Brolin’s book about the dangers of living hard and fast. Brolin, who writes that he was “born to drink,” grew up the son of an alcoholic mother, Jane Cameron Agee, who took him to a bar as a child. The book’s title refers to a drinking contest between his mother and her boyfriend that Brolin witnessed as a teenager. It ended after 15 laps; The boyfriend was later discovered collapsed under a truck, with his legs sticking out from under the vehicle.

And Brolin was his mother’s son in other ways. He didn’t just start drinking at a dangerously young age. He started smoking pot when he was nine and tried LSD at thirteen. Later there would be nine prison sentences, countless bar fights and a stabbing in Costa Rica. Brolin admits he’s lucky to be alive.

“I feel so happy because I had so many friends who died,” he says. “I don’t have survival guilt, but I do feel a sense of responsibility to live my life to the fullest. I wasn’t one of those people where I didn’t know what was happening when I drank. I didn’t black out. I chose to drink, and after making that choice, I did some terrible things. I was willing to put up with those horrible things to have an identity. Because without alcohol I didn’t feel like I was a full person.”

But things have changed. Brolin hasn’t drunk in 11 years and finally decided to quit after he showed up at his grandmother’s deathbed smelling of booze.

“I had a moment where she smiled at me and I thought, ‘How dare I?’” Brolin says. ‘It made me realize that I had everything at my disposal, and yet I destroy it. And that was it. I love the clarity that comes with sobriety. Maybe it’s a posturing, but I love the rebellion of saying, ‘Okay, I’ve lived 45 years of that life. Now I’m going to live another 45 years without drinking.’”

Even when he drank too much, Brolin gave one compelling performance after another. He broke into the mainstream with his role as a taciturn cowboy in ‘No Country for Old Men’, and went on to play heavies, man’s men and the 43rd president in ‘True Grit’, ‘Milk’ and ‘W.’ But now that he’s sober, Brolin thinks he’s become a better actor. More present, more disciplined, more willing to take risks.

“It’s not that I didn’t do a good job,” he says. “I was very professional when I acted. I didn’t often come to work drunk. I did that occasionally. But now that I’m sober, I’ve discovered different levels in the things I do.”

He also has more self-confidence. He recently took a job on Rian Johnson’s “Wake Up Dead Man,” a sequel to “Knives Out” with crackling dialogue.

“I read it and I thought, ‘This is so sublime,’” he says. “This writing is of the highest standard. And I got scared. I thought, ‘I don’t know if I’m good enough to do this. I don’t know if I can portray all these subtleties in an organic and authentic way.’ But I did a lot of preparation and preparation for it. That would all have been very different if I had been drinking. I don’t know if I could have done it.”

“From Under the Truck” is not a conventional celebrity memoir. It’s looser, wilder, more poetic. Moving forward and backward in time, the book mixes memories of growing up on a ranch in Paso Robles, California, with his wild mother and famous father, “The Amityville Horror” star James Brolin, with scenes from the sets of ‘ The Goonies’ and ‘Inherent Vice’. Instead of light-hearted anecdotes about a life in the spotlight, Brolin shares stories about masturbating using hotel pillows or drunkenly insulting Robert De Niro during an awards lunch.

“The book was a living, breathing thing that I tried not to get in the way,” Brolin says. “Is this the most accessible? No. But I was very open and held myself to a certain standard that I tried to stay true to.”

While recording the Audible version of “From Under the Truck,” Brolin panicked. Had he gone too far?

“I got halfway through and thought, ‘Oh, fuck. What have I done?’” he says. “I wanted to burn any evidence that this thing ever existed. And it took about a month. But after being in this shame spiral, I decided to put all that aside. I realized that this book is 1000% what it wanted and needed to be.”

Brolin, despite the setbacks and hardships he has endured, has undeniably traveled in some rarefied circles. After all, his stepmother is Barbra Streisand. At one of Streisand’s dinner parties, Brolin watched John Travolta use Scientology techniques to “heal” Marlon Brando’s injured leg.

“It was supposed to be a joke, but it turned out to be an amazing collective experience that I was able to witness from a distance,” says Brolin. “At the time I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ Now I look back and say, ‘That was such a beautiful moment.’ Scientology has nothing to do with it. I have seen someone care for someone else in this thoughtful way. It’s funny how your perspective can change.”

Brolin hasn’t softened his view that the Oscars screwed up when they failed to nominate his “Dune” director Denis Villeneuve for the 2021 sci-fi epic. This year, Villeneuve is back in the awards race for overseeing ‘Dune : Part Two,” the rare sequel that received better reviews than the original. Brolin plays Gurney Halleck, a mentor to Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides.

“If he doesn’t get nominated this year, I’ll quit acting,” Brolin says. “It was a better movie than the first one. When I watched it, I felt like my brain had been cracked open. It’s masterful, and Denis is one of our master filmmakers. If the Academy Awards have any meaning, they will recognize him.”