How Josh Brolin Wrote A Memoir As Wild As His Life

Josh Brolin’s From Under The Truck is not exactly a celebrity autobiography, or a now-sober guy’s literary remembrance of wild times past, or a son’s memoir about loving and losing a difficult parent, although at points, depending on where you open the book, it resembles all of those things. It’s a mosaic of bright shards—dated short pieces written in the emotionally raw, low-exposition manner of journal entries, arranged nonlinearly but associatively, as if we're looking at the story from the perspective of a Josh Brolin who has come unstuck in time. At one point Brolin toggles between memories from the sets of two movies: The Goonies, which launched his acting career in 1985, and the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men, the project that lifted Brolin out of the professional doldrums in 2007. At another point, a story from the mid-1970s about the “utter fucking havoc” and unimaginable stress of the Rancho Palos Verdes home Brolin and his younger brother shared with their mother (and the wolves, mountain lions and coyotes she kept as pets) is followed immediately by a recollection, from 2022, of teaching his own child to swim, with tender care.