“My dream was always that we would do a family memoir,” reveals author Moon Zappa, the eldest child of late art-rock savant Frank Zappa. “I thought it’d be so interesting to tell our story chronologically, and then each person kind of put their little point on that timeline in a story.”

That project, of course, never happened: Moon’s book idea, like many of her creative dreams and concepts, was “shot down” by her stern and sometimes sadistic mother, Gail Zappa, who took over managing the Zappa estate after Frank died at age 52. However, such a book might have been a confusing read anyway, likely riddled with conflicting narratives from four people who Moon says “were not really trained to make space for one another” while existing in separate “bubbles” in the chaotic Zappa home.

“A shared history — that’s everything to me. But you also have to have a shared reality, and I don’t think we have a Venn diagram crossover in some cases,” Moon says, reflecting on how she and her siblings, Dweezil, Ahmet, and Diva, have wildly different recollections of what it was like to grow up with the so-called “unconventional parenting” of Gail and Frank (whom the children always addressed by their first names, never as Mom and Dad). “What if three people had a great time, but one person was looking around, really a fish out of water, not enjoying this?”

And so, Moon has penned her own astonishing, often heartbreaking, consistently brilliant book, Earth to Moon: A Memoir — a “reclamation” of her complex story that has taken “many steady years of therapy to untangle.”

Moon, now 56, writes of endlessly longing for the attention and affection of her Spock-like, workaholic father (who was her “favorite human being ever, full stop”) — catering to him when he spent hours locked away in his home studio, and missing him desperately when he went on tour and never invited his wife and kids to visit him on the road. She writes of feeling like a cog in the family business — pushed into pop stardom after her 1982 novelty duet with Frank, “Valley Girl,” became a surprise smash, even though she was an awkward, anxious, acne-suffering 14-year-old who just yearned to be a regular kid. She writes of envying the normal family lives of the suburban schoolmates she joked about in that hit song — while in her dysfunctional, boundary-less Hollywood home, Gail would handcuff Moon and Dweezil at the ankles and lock them in a bathroom as punishment, “orgy artwork” adorned the walls, and a scary “array of horny dreamers, oddballs, misfits, and sycophants” came and went.

Among those hangers-on was a “braless lady” that Frank sometimes bedded in the basement, and Moon also writes of how his father’s many not-so-secret trysts with groupies, and especially a longtime affair with a German girlfriend named Gerda, stoked Gail’s bitterness and misery, making it so Moon lived in constant fear of her mother’s rageful mood swings. She writes of being made to feel like she was in competition with both her siblings and her mom, and having her own achievements (even “Valley Girl’s” breakout success) and aspirations diminished by her parents, which left her struggling with insecurity and imposter syndrome as she attempted to pursue an acting career after “peaking” at age 14. She writes of being parentified, forced into a caregiving, people-pleasing role when she was still in grade school (“My survival coping skill was the toxic-femininity version of selflessness and chronic giving until I’m dust and have no needs,” she tells Lyndsanity), only to be forced out of the house to live on her own as a teenager when she hadn’t been taught any practical life skills.

And finally, the “loyal to a fault” Moon writes about how, after she settled back into her familiar caretaking role when her parents were dying  (Frank of prostate cancer in 1993, Gail of lung cancer in 2015), her kindness went unrewarded. For instance, she was deeply hurt when Frank played along, in a Howard Stern interview, with Stern’s joke that she was a “leeching” celebrity kid who needed to get a steady job, when she’d in fact sacrificed so much to be by her dad’s side in his final years. But at least Frank had decreed in his will that his estate be divided evenly among his four children. When Gail passed away, however, she cruelly ignored her husband’s wishes, instead granting Ahmet and Diva majority control over the family trust. “What mother does this? What the fuck did I do? What mother chooses some kids over others… and divides a family into a them and an us, into a hateful before and an even worse after?” a “blindsided” Moon fumes in her memoir.

“One of the things that’s so tragic about her last chess move was she robbed me of the chance to grieve her,” Moon muses during our Lyndsanity interview. “She robbed me of the chance to apologize for whatever grudge she must have held. It’s like waste after waste after waste, and then creating that rift that then got continued. It is, to me, unimaginable and so unfortunate.”

The damage caused by the ensuing “probate horror” is only beginning to be repaired. Towards the end of Earth to Moon, Moon mentions not speaking with Ahmet and Diva for almost six years or with Dweezil for two years, but she did recently sit down with Ahmet and Diva for an in-depth, tearful Washington Post interview about their legal battles and fraught family legacy. (Dweezil was interviewed separately for that piece; according to the Post, he no longer talks to any of his fellow Zappa offspring and “isn’t interested in spending any time in the presence of his brother. Ever.”) During our Lyndsanity interview, Moon says her siblings have not yet read Earth to Moon and to her knowledge “have not expressed an interest in reading it.” But the book does conclude on an open, hopeful note, implying that the Zappas could one day be a family unit again — even if they were hardly a typical family in the first place.

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So, perhaps that Zappa family memoir will one day be written — but actually, Earth to Moon is such a vivid and visceral read, it would be tough to top. And it might even become a biopic one day, considering how many fascinating, insightful cinematic references Moon makes during our Lyndsanity conversation.

In the video above and Q&A below, Moon, as eloquent and candid in conversation as she is on the page, opens up about how telling her story helped her better understand her parents and come to terms with her childhood trauma, and how she hopes her memoir can help others heal.

LYNDSANITY: Wow, what an incredible memoir Earth to Moon is. I honestly don’t even know where to begin. I guess first of all, congratulations for getting your story out there — the way you wanted to tell it.

MOON ZAPPA: Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Yeah, I worked my ass off!

How does it feel to have it out there? Is it scary? Is it healing? Both?

Well, in the book I explore the question: Is genius worth the collateral damage? And for me, naming where I felt like I wasn’t cared for and the confusion around how come a genius doesn’t know how to do a basic thing like support an emotion or give a hug, I think that that is an act of self-care. It’s not to criticize where I came from. It’s to just claim my experience and celebrate the best aspects of what I got out of being raised in that family as kind of the apprentice of a maestro, but also to help name for other people maybe something that they couldn’t articulate. Because for me, books and movies and songs were skeleton keys for me to kind of piece together all that was missing, or the places where I was stunted or where bad wiring got in and trying to decondition myself from just some stuff that just shouldn’t be in there. Embed from Getty Images

In the book’s dedication on page one, you mention Frank, but Gail’s name isn’t listed. I think Gail comes off much worse in Earth to Moon than Frank does, so that’s obviously not an oversight…

My father was the funniest, smartest, most inspirational person in my life, and before having a child and becoming a parent, he was everything to me. He was a kind of a soulmate. I mean, even in Linda Goodman’s book Sun Signs, my father and I are an example of compatibility between a Sagittarius and a Libra. So, it wasn’t just me who felt there was this amazing connection; it was reflected in the outer world. And I think that that threatened Gail. And as a result of her military upbringing and probably her lack of being able to have a soft place to land inside herself, it was projected outwards. That’s my opinion, that’s my experience, and that’s what I share. And I think in one section of the book, there’s actually a drawing I did when I was really little, and it’s me and Gail. Gail’s holding an umbrella only over herself and I’ve written, “I hope you die.” I’ve crossed out “die” and written “love me.” To me, that is so telling — that’s so early on, and I’m like, “Fuck this!”

I’m sorry to laugh, but…

It’s funny!

It’s funny, but it’s also not.

Yeah, well, the thing too that I learned from my father is turning tragedy into farce. That’s a skillset.

You write a lot about your mom’s unpredictable anger, walking on eggshells, trying to manage her rage or do things to not trigger it. That’s a scary way to grow up, never feeling 100 percent safe in your own home. But in writing about Gail, did you develop more empathy or understanding for why she was the way she was?

I really did. As I was doing the research and looking at just the tour dates where my father was traveling, I know how I feel when I don’t have any support. And now imagine you’ve got no support for months and months on end, and you’ve got children to care for and a business to run. That’s not easy. And if you don’t trust people naturally… I mean, early on my father was pushed off a stage by somebody in the audience, and I think that these kinds of events kept setting up a worldview of mistrust that was then passed on. Certainly to me. Embed from Getty Images

It’s not uncommon for male rock stars to cheat on the road, and you write a lot about that — about how Frank’s rampant infidelity affected Gail, of course, but also how it affected you and your view of relationships, how it gave you this message that women don’t really matter. You wrote that you feared all men were like your dad. Can you talk about that?

I mean, just to be a daughter of somebody who would say things like “more than a mouthful is a waste” or referring to some women as an “ironing board,” and just this feeling of being exposed to too much sexuality too soon, it created a lot of fear in me. It created a lot of questioning about what my value was. Like, if you don’t treat Gail well, then how do I understand that I’m valuable too, because I come from her? It is a confusing message when you’re really little. Then as I got older, I just thought, “This is not my value system”; we all became serial monogamists, my siblings and I. It was just so unfair to me [for Frank] to behave that way. Maybe I wouldn’t have cared as much if he showed up to more sporting events or school plays. I don’t know. I think I would still be disgusted by that kind of treatment of women and that behavior. But again, in the book I explore the patriarchy, growing up inside of the culture of a patriarchy where those kind of extra lady-perks are revered. That’s why some people get into the music business — just to have the applause and the extra mouths on body parts, I guess.

There’s a cliché that you marry your father. And when you write about one of your early dating experiences, with a young, rising sitcom actor named Woody Harrelson, certain ways he treated you were similar to Frank’s behavior — and Gail advised you that if you love someone, you just put up with it. Were you able to break that pattern? Because some women never break that pattern. They repeat it for their entire romantic life.

It is a tricky thing to unwind and untangle, especially in a culture that continues to further and foster that narrative and prize that behavior. And so long as there’s a girl with daddy issues and men that will take advantage, then that dynamic is going to continue. And it is a personal journey. It’s not an easy path to undo. I really had my fair share of exploring dating people that were just incredibly selfish. And the upside to it is learning. Unfortunately, the human experience of learning is failing and choosing poorly until you choose wisely. That’s the process. Maybe you’re lucky and you’re raised in a home where you’re like, “Oh, I’m entitled to great stuff” right out of the gate, but I would say for most people, they don’t have that luxury. So, that’s how you learn — you fall down seven times, and stand up the eighth.

You mentioned “daddy issues.” I actually dislike that term, because I feel it trivializes what a neglected or mistreated daughter has gone through — like, “Oh, she’s got daddy issues,” as if it’s just something she should get over, rather than putting any blame or responsibility on the father who made her that way.

That is such a good point. Because what’s more accurate is when you grow up with an absent father or a father who is not attuned to you or doesn’t support you in your emotions, if you grow up in a house where emotions are not valued… I used to say my father was like having Spock and Jesus for a dad. He belonged to the world, and he had that coldness where he could be very reductionist and would go to problem-solving instead of looking at the feelings. He just didn’t value, it seemed to me, pausing to feel a feeling. Of course that created a huge longing, because then there’s a stunted place in myself that’s always grasping for getting that foundational piece of love and support, that balance of masculine and feminine inside yourself.

It’s a loaded question, but do you feel Gail and Frank didn’t quite have parental instincts or didn’t derive any real joy from parenting and family?I feel that particularly about Gail. I read with horror when your daughter was seriously ill with pneumonia in ICU and Gail didn’t seem to care, didn’t even come to the hospital — she didn’t even seem to have grandmother instincts. I mean, Frank and Gail obviously had four kids, so they must have wanted a family. But it’s kind of weird that they had a family and then got so many Parenting 101 things wrong.

That’s what I explore in the book. From my perspective, both of them came from Catholic households in legacy patriarchy, and my father’s model probably simply was the wife takes care of the kids and the man works. And for Gail, I think years of resentment just kept accruing and accruing and accruing, with her needs not getting met. It’s really hard to give from a place of emptiness; I would say it’s impossible. And then if you’re trying to also maintain this kind of public forward-facing where we’re a tight family like the Kennedys or the royal family, it is just a lot to manage. It sucked to be on the receiving end of it, but I also can hold the paradox of how she got there. I mean, I was angry both at Gail and Frank. I kept thinking, “Divorce!”

During the “Valley Girl” era, you’d do these lighthearted interviews about their “unconventional parenting,” about how you were this eccentric, wacky rock ‘n’ roll family like the Osbournes. I’m sure kids watching you on MTV thought, “Wow, it’d be so fun to grow up as a Zappa!”

Yeah, like all Pippi Longstockings in one family. And the house itself also was like Robinson Caruso — wild. It had a jungle and a spiral staircase and a fireman’s pole for getting from one room to another, just all this whimsy and all that.

It sounds fun, but it seems you envied the more normal family life of your actual Valley friends. You also just talked about being overexposed to sexual stuff in your home. My own dad had a subscription to Playboy when I was a kid and left Playboys everywhere, in full view of me and my sister. Do you think parenting back then, maybe because everyone was trying to be a “cool dad” or “cool mom,” was just different, more freewheeling? You obviously had a supercool dad. I’d love to discuss how some people think it’d be great to grow up with parents with no hangups, but maybe it wasn’t so great.

Thank you for sharing a personal experience, because I had the same kind of thing, just growing up with [X-rated] material and media laying around. That was not my preference and I felt way too young to be exposed to it. And I ended up being the girl looking for turtleneck bathing suits, like, “How can I stay as covered as possible?” I was not about any attention on my body. It definitely sent a message that that’s what men like, that male gaze. It just made me so uncomfortable. One thing that makes me laugh in my book is when you’d read these magazines and it would say that [the centerfold model] weighs 120 pounds. I was like, “Why are they listing their weight? What does weight have to do with anything?” It was baffling to me. I was like, “Is that as heavy as a dog food bag? Why do you need to know?” It was bizarre information to me. But also, I think that [Frank and Gail’s generation] possibly were rebelling against the constraints they felt growing up. I don’t know how comfortable they were, ultimately, with those choices, but in order to get comfortable, you have to boldly try it.

On the subject of weight, your book does mention diet culture a lot. Everyone was drinking Tab and SlimFast, eating Figurines, doing Jazzercize in the ‘70s and ‘80s. And this was all happening at a time when you were thrust into the public eye and were so insecure about your looks and weight, as most 14-year-old girls are. I thought it was interesting that no one ever asked you, “Hey, do you want to do this? Do you want to perform on Solid Gold? Do you want to do an interview on this TV show?”

I mean, it’s no accident that I love movies about avalanches and mountain-climbing and runaway trains, because that’s what it felt like in my house. You were on this thing that just didn’t seem like it had any breaks and was always moving forward and moving fast. Again, I was a kid craving my father’s time and attention, and receiving his impatience or his desire to get back to work or get back on the road. And so, for me to slide a note under his studio door and say, “I’ve cracked the code. You’re a workaholic. Let’s have some studio time together,” this was just my attempt at connection. And then in the craziest surprise turn of events, it becomes a song  [“Valley Girl”] on an album that then becomes incredibly popular — in some ways to my father’s dismay, because a whole body of [previous] work was being ignored. I think at that point he probably had 50 albums to his name, but that was the breakout song. And suddenly I’m now a PR voice for the family, when I don’t want any eyes on me because of my bad skin and my chub. I didn’t set out to be a musician, and I didn’t even sing; I was just doing a voice that made my dad laugh. All I wanted to do was make my dad laugh. And then the world was laughing, and then it had a life of its own. And then the message again, career-wise, was, “Well, how do you have a second and third and fourth ‘accident’?” Because my best efforts to create work that I enjoyed didn’t have the same impact [as the fluke success of “Valley Girl”].

You talked about the Zappas being this dynasty, like the Kennedys. Another thing that stuck out to me in the book was a message you got from Frank and Gail: “We’re not a family, we’re a family business.” I imagine you felt, at least at times, exploited for the family business’s agenda.

I did. I felt like I was a mouthpiece just being shoved out the door: “Make the statement and help generate the thing that’s feeding all of us.” So, you’re a part of this thing, but you’re also simultaneously being told you’re not a part of this [success] — that your dad did all the work and you’re just a tool he used. It was extremely confusing to both be publicly lauded and then privately almost scolded, and then also have to go out there and tap-dance and be a little performing monkey. Just a lot of realities to juggle. Embed from Getty Images

I know Gail was jealous of the attention you got when “Valley Girl” was a hit and suddenly it became like “The Frank & Moon Show.” But I’m wondering if Dweezil resented it too. He’s obviously the musician among the four Zappa kids, and he also had a song, “My Mother Is a Space Cadet,” that same year. Did it bother him that you became a pop star? Was he like, “Hey, why isn’t ‘My Mother Is a Space Cadet’ on KROQ too?”

You’d have to ask Dweezil. I think we all had such different experiences, which is another piece of the story that I tell: What if three people had a great time, but one person was looking around, really a fish out of water, not enjoying this? Because I observed all of us being, in my opinion, under-cared for. I mean, I think [my parents] did a real disservice by not telling me I’m smart and saying, “Let’s get you in college,” not noticing I actually love learning and that that was a path more suited for my temperament and my interests. I didn’t even know I was smart. I didn’t even know I was smart enough to get into a school. And then my father would be publicly talking about the importance of education, while not making sure his kids had one. … It’s not that I wasn’t encouraged to do something else, it’s just there was no unifying, “Hey, what are you up to? How can I make your dream also come true?” All energy went to my father.

It broke my heart when I read they pulled you out of a good school that you enjoyed attending and just told you, “You’re getting your GED.” Also, the story when you were learning to play the harp and loved it, but you needed to graduate to a bigger harp. Here you had this musician father, but he didn’t encourage you. He didn’t get you a new harp, so you gave it up. I would have expected him to be, like, “Yes, let’s get you the best harp there is!”

Right? Like, “You’re going to stay the course of this harp. I know it’s hard, but keep practicing, kid!” Something! Again, even now when I hear people use the word “genius,” I’m like, “What got lost as a result of that genius? What did other people have to sacrifice so that genius could exist?” Because who wouldn’t want to just be like, “I only do my work and you bring the food and you drive me around and you clean the house”? Who wouldn’t want to be the emperor of the universe? We all did. We all saw that that was the best job to have. But only one person got that.

You do write repeatedly about feeling like an outsider in your own family. You even felt that way when you were gathered around Frank’s deathbed and your style of mourning differed from the others’. It’s interesting that you had such a different overall experience from your siblings. Did they know you were writing this book? Have they read it? Will they read it?

They have not read it. To my knowledge, they have not expressed an interest in reading it. Again, growing up in my house, it wasn’t that we were set up for competition, but it was kind of a house where no one really liked what anybody else was working on. … There wasn’t this feeling of cohesion that I was craving, that I was seeing in movies and television that was exemplary to me. Or even in my friend’s homes, just the act of eating a meal together at the table, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Even just that basic thing of a check-in was just non-existent in our home. So yeah, we just were not really trained to make space for one another. It was six people doing their own thing, six bubbles in a free-for-all. But all the bubbles, again, pointed to the top of the pyramid [at Frank].

That’s such a shame. Your siblings are the only three other people in the world who could even begin to relate to this crazy life experience you had.

A shared history — that’s everything to me. But you also have to have a shared reality, and I don’t think we have a Venn diagram crossover in some cases. My dream was always that we would do a family memoir. I thought it’d be so interesting to tell our story chronologically, and then each person kind of put their little point on that timeline in a story. And I presented this idea to Gail. I presented documentary ideas and family shows, and she just shot every single thing down. And that was so disheartening, because when I would observe her moving forward as being in charge of the intellectual property, she put me in a feeling of competition. … It didn’t make sense to me. And then becoming a parent, it made even less sense to me. It’s so easy to say, “This isn’t about you. I’m so sorry for that. Here’s a cuddle. Here’s some healthy food.” Yes, we got the basics: food, shelter, clothing. If you even call it food — Sara Lee poundcake and Velveeta cheese, while Frank is eating at Le Cirque.

Again, people from the outside looking in will assume you grew up in this glamorous and privileged world, yet in some ways you were so sheltered from the real world.

Yeah, I really related to the show Westworld, because whatever was programmed was programmed, and then somebody could be standing next to a door and not see it. They weren’t programmed to “recognize door.” There were so many places that I was glitching; I always had this feeling of, “There’s a manual of how to do life, and I didn’t receive it.” It’s not a complaint about [my parents], because somebody can’t give what they don’t have themselves or don’t value. I was asking for things that they just either didn’t have or didn’t have a shared interest in. And that’s so frustrating, because then you have to wait until you are out of the house, and then you have to undo all the bad wiring and rebuild from no template. But some people could call that freedom.

How do you feel about the term “nepo baby”?

I laugh when people are mad at nepo babies or whatever. Why fight that somebody would be granted an opportunity? Isn’t the whole point of life to create as much abundance as possible and then help other people’s dreams come true? And I didn’t get the perk that I was promised and that people are so mad about. And where I did, I didn’t know how to use it. I didn’t know how to use it to my advantage. Part of that was being a girl in that family, and part of that was just the mindset.

You had a unique position in your family that might have contributed to you feeling like an outsider. You were totally parentified because you were the eldest, and because you were female. You had to do so much caretaking of your siblings, maybe even shielding them from stuff. That’s a lot for someone so young to take on. And on top of that, then you became a breadwinner in the family. But did any of this teach you any lessons you could take into adulthood?

Oh, yeah. There were many skills that I did get. In some cases, my playbook was do the exact opposite of where you come from, and then little by little integrating the stuff that I really appreciated — my mother’s sense of aesthetics, which was unparalleled, or my father’s fashion sense, his work ethic, his humor, his reasoning. [Frank] really carried into the First Amendment/civic duty/get-out-and-vote part of my life. And just [Gail’s] choices of attorneys and whatever that world was, I got to make those kinds of choices and think, “Do I want to have less control over my finances, or more control?” Those kinds of things, because both of my parents died millions of dollars in debt. And so, I developed a terror of money, because you think, “OK, if a genius doesn’t know to get health insurance…”

Wait, did Frank not have health insurance when he had cancer?

He did not have health insurance when he had cancer.

Whoa. I can’t even imagine how much money was being spent on his care…

Exactly. My God. It’s crazy. And how must that make you feel, when you’re labeled a “genius”? He must have had some feelings of, “How did I end up here?”

Wow. You mentioned in your book that Andy Warhol defended you, or said some kind words about you, and that “planted a seed” in you. Tell me about that.

I guess he observed Frank not being very kind and supportive of me, basically saying, “I made [Moon]. I invented her.” And Andy was like, “What?” There is footage of my father and Andy Warhol, and you can see their dynamic. It is a stunning moment of these two iconoclasts just not being compatible.

I think it’s interesting that Warhol, who was all about inventing celebrities himself and giving them their 15 minutes, basically said the opposite about you.

I know! That’s why it was so validating. It was like, “If that guy is saying I matter, how come it’s not happening in my own home?” That confusion of, “Why are people outside the home in many cases nicer to me than what’s happening inside the home?” I don’t know how much my father knew because he was gone so much, and the household was one way when Gail was alone and another way when my dad was present. I don’t know that he even knew what the culture of the house was like when he wasn’t there, because Gail was so vocal about, “I do everything for the kids!” And that’s a mixed message — if you’re doing everything for the kids, then why does it feel so unpleasant?

The Bruce Weber story was also interesting — that this famous photographer took a raw, unfiltered picture of you as a teenager that at the time you were mortified about, but it’s a beautiful photo and now you have very different feelings about it. It’s interesting that other geniuses outside of the family saw you so differently from how your own family saw you, or how you saw yourself.

Being seen is a big theme in the book, which I hope other people can relate to. I think it’s a natural, actual legitimate need to feel you belong. And to have that be missing, this fundamental need, you end up questing for having an experience of belonging so that you can build that internally. And when you then have this mistrust in your family, you don’t feel safe in your family. So, of course it’s going to be harder to have other eyes on you, and of course you’re going to not be able to trust somebody else’s vision of you. A lot of these things are time-capsules that I get to revisit and say, “Oh, that is another way to look at it,” because it is amazing — [Weber] really did capture something in that photo.

There were other, less famous outside observers who also saw your family situation differently, more for what it really was — like a concerned school headmaster and a television interviewer who both suspected you were being abused and asked if you were OK. Were those wake-up calls, when you realized, “Oh, this isn’t normal”? 

Yeah. There’s a foreign film, [Dogtooth]; it’s on the Criterion Channel. In the movie this family is so concerned with protecting their children that they lock them inside a house and teach them wrong words for “telephone” or for “bathtub” or whatever the thing is, so they have this insular language that does not apply to an external world. And in some ways, I could really relate to that feeling, because I was blindsided by some basic “family behavior” which then, in the outside world, people were like, “Hey, that shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t be like that.” And at first I was all Sicilian and defending my family, like, “You can’t insult my family!” But then, as I write in the book and as you described, I had to take a second look at some things that I was calling “love,” “family,” “comforting,” whatever that list was. It was a big, big slap and surprise to find out that just some basic things were not that great.

Gail called you an empath. Do you agree? Maybe that’s why you were more sensitive than your siblings were. Maybe that’s why your childhood memories are so different from theirs.

In some ways I wonder. She labeled me empath and I tried to become the thing, if it meant I was going to get love for being that thing. So, I don’t really even know if it’s true or if I developed it as a result of being told, “That’s the persona that I’m giving you.” And yet I was hypersensitive, so to be both called histrionic and an empath — how do you reconcile that?

It broke my heart again to read about how you took such good care of Gail when she was dying, and then you got punished from beyond the grave, in her will.

Yeah, one of the things that’s so tragic about her last chess move was she robbed me of the chance to grieve her. She robbed me of the chance to apologize for whatever she grudge she must have held. It’s like waste after waste after waste, and then creating that rift that then got continued. It is, to me, unimaginable and so unfortunate. Embed from Getty Images

Here’s another loaded question. You always craved your father’s admiration or approval, and Gail’s too. You must have wondered, as you were writing this book, what your parents would think of it. Is that something that you’ve grappled with?

I wanted to give a portrait of showing my father’s human side — not to knock him off people’s pedestals, but to just say life is messy. Life is complicated. Life has many colors. In terms of what I think they would think about it… I don’t know. If I answer that from the place of who I knew them to be, they’d probably both have some pushback on the exposure of being flawed.

I’m sure you get asked a lot about how you’re so normal. Or maybe the better word is grounded. You seem like a sane, serene, self-aware person who’s come to terms with what you’ve been through. You seem at peace. Or relatively at peace.

I think I hit this in the book, just this idea that I was really raised from so early on to be thinking about how we present ourselves in the outside world. When fans are naming businesses after you and your father doesn’t do drugs, it creates this narrow, straight line to walk. I didn’t want to end up in rehab and then spoil someone’s LLC situation that they’ve got on the side. So, those demands kind of kept me from falling, in some ways. And also, my dad’s quest for never having any obstacle between him and his creativity — he role-modeled a path of no distractions and not falling off course. And then on top of it, my survival coping skill was the toxic-femininity version of selflessness and chronic giving until I’m dust and have no needs. So, all of these things kind of created this container that I walked. Like, on the most basic level, they say if you don’t drink and you make it to 26, chances are you won’t drink as you progress. So, whatever habits you build in childhood, those things… objects in motions tend to stay in motion. If you’ve got bad ingredients in there, those bad ingredients tend to keep in motion; if you’ve got good ingredients, those continue as well. And then as an adult, we get to choose, “Well, which ingredients am I moving forward with, and which ones am I fighting against?” I mean, I know vegetables are better for me. But I sometimes eat a cookie.

Well, congratulations on the book. You did a great job. As since you have referenced a few films during this interview, I just want to put it out there: Earth to Moon is the biopic I want to see.

I’d like to see it too. … It would be fun to see it moving around and come to light in that way. It would be a lot of fun. Who would you cast?

As you? Oh God, I need to think about that for a second. Maybe you could act in it. Acting was one of your original dreams.

Well, it’s funny. In the film Honey Boy, watching Shia [LaBeouf] play his father in that film, that was mind-blowing — to watch that healing process of reconciling his experience of growing up, and then playing the thing that was the alligator he was wrestling. He played the alligator. So, it is a thought. It is a thought.