Tallulah Willis pens a candid essay about father Bruce Willis’s decline

Tallulah Willis, daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore has penned a candid and moving essay for VOGUE about her father’s recent diagnosis with frontotemporal dementia, which affects the ability to communicate, work, walk, and other symptoms. He has since retired from acting.

Tallulah’s essay focuses on how his condition has affected the family, her relationship with her father, and her own wellness.

“I’ve known that something was wrong for a long time,” she writes. “It started out with a kind of vague unresponsiveness, which the family chalked up to Hollywood hearing loss: ‘Speak up! Die Hard messed with Dad’s ears.’”

She continues, “Later that unresponsiveness broadened, and I sometimes took it personally. He had had two babies with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought he’d lost interest in me. Though this couldn’t have been further from the truth, my adolescent brain tortured itself with some faulty math: I’m not beautiful enough for my mother, I’m not interesting enough for my father.”

She goes on to talk about how growing up in a famous family affected her sense of self worth, which later in life was compounded by Bruce’s illness. Tallulah has previously been very vocal about suffering with body dysmorphia and anorexia, and now she goes into detail. Writing that she first developed these issues after reading the comments section on Perez Hilton while on a trip with Demi Moore and then-husband Ashton Kutcher, where online trolls attacked her looks.

She says that in order to cope with Bruce’s cognitive decline, she held on to her disordered eating. “I admit that I have met Bruce’s decline in recent years with a share of avoidance and denial that I’m not proud of. The truth is that I was too sick myself to handle it. For the last four years, I have suffered from anorexia nervosa, which I’ve been reluctant to talk about because, after getting sober at age 20, restricting food has felt like the last vice that I got to hold on to.”

She admits to also being diagnosed with ADHD and Borderline Personality Disorder during this time, and that in the spring of 2022, when the world learned about Bruce’s condition, she weighed 84 pounds. “I was always freezing. I was calling mobile IV teams to come to my house, and I couldn’t walk in my Los Angeles neighborhood because I was afraid of not having a place to sit down and catch my breath,” she writes of her worst moments.

“I had managed to give my central dad-feeling canal an epidural; the good feelings weren’t really there, the bad feelings weren’t really there. But I remember a moment when it hit me painfully: I was at a wedding in the summer of 2021 on Martha’s Vineyard, and the bride’s father made a moving speech,” 

“Suddenly I realized that I would never get that moment, my dad speaking about me in adulthood at my wedding. It was devastating. I left the dinner table, stepped outside, and wept in the bushes.”

This is when her former fiancé Dillon Buss dumped her and her family sent her to a treatment centre. She writes that she began to feel better at this place and  now has “the tools to be present in all facets of my life, and especially in my relationship with my dad.”

Now, she writes that she takes endless photographs and saves every voicemail from her famous father.

“I’m like an archaeologist, searching for treasure in stuff that I never used to pay much attention to,” she says.  “I find that I’m trying to document, to build a record for the day when he isn't there to remind

me of him and of us.”

She adds: “In the past I was so afraid of being destroyed by sadness, but finally I feel that I can show up and be relied upon. I can savor that time, hold my dad’s hand, and feel that it’s wonderful. I know that trials are looming, that this is the beginning of grief, but that whole thing about loving yourself before you can love somebody else – it’s real.”

The essay is loaded with many other fascinating tidbits behind the scenes of the Willis-Moore family, which include her and her sisters Rumer and Scout learning from a young age to lie flat under coats in the backseat of the car to avoid paparazzi, and that they could only get their family photos developed in one photo lab in Idaho because Bruce had the shop sign an NDA. 

You can read the entire essay here.