The book a long way home how to#

If his days feel overdetermined, it is a sensation that he much prefers to prison, where he had nothing but time and few opportunities to use it as he wished. He is pursuing an acting career, plugging away at some screenwriting projects, having occasional breakfasts with Kirk Douglas, who lives nearby, and volunteering at the Los Angeles Mission, a homeless shelter. Since his release, Cameron Douglas has moved back to Los Angeles, where he lives with his girlfriend and their daughter. “Taking responsibility for one’s actions is a lot tougher.” “As a human being, placing blame is very easy,” she said. “Why, should I be worried?”Įven after being told that “Long Way Home” discussed intimate details of her marriage to Michael Douglas and its dissolution, Diandra Douglas expressed confidence that Cameron would strike the right tone. She read parts of an earlier manuscript but did not know “the ultimate outcome” of the book, she said. “If I told you all the rehabs I’ve been to, and court hearings and visitations and driving 950 miles every other weekend to prisons, it’s really consumed, I would say, a large portion of my life for 24 years,” she said.

The book a long way home how to#

“You learn how to balance between that public exposure and maintaining your own privacy,” he said.ĭiandra Douglas, a documentary film producer and philanthropist, said that it was difficult for her to read “Long Way Home,” having already lived through its harrowing details herself. He added that he and his family were accustomed to being on display. There’s always going to be an element of criticism, which I certainly accept and understand. “It was not a book that was solely based on how his parents let him down. Michael Douglas said that he read “a couple of drafts” of his son’s book and identified “a couple of places” where he “took issue of his interpretation of a moment here or there and said, ‘Excuse me, au contraire.’ ’’ Overall, he said he was impressed.

“I thought in telling the story, if he was able to make a book deal, it might make him really try to understand what the hell happened and where it all went,” Michael Douglas said. “I thought I lost him a couple times over those years,” Michael Douglas said.Įven before Cameron was released from prison, his father encouraged him to write a memoir. Michael Douglas, whose half brother Eric died of an accidental drug and alcohol overdose in 2004, said in an interview that he had resigned himself to the belief that Cameron would meet a similar fate. “A lot of the anger that I felt was really towards myself, because I was failing at making him proud of me,” he said. As he writes in the book, “Every son admires his own father, but everyone in the world admired mine.”Ĭameron Douglas said that estrangement worsened through his years of drug use, as he felt he saw his father pulling away. Cameron worshiped his father but resented having to share him with his many fans.

Similar tensions emerged in Cameron Douglas’s relationship with Michael, and sometimes, as Cameron describes, they even fought physically. He describes a childhood populated by his father’s celebrity pals - Jack Nicholson, Pat Riley, Danny De Vito - and he has fond memories of seeing “beautiful grown-ups doing the things that beautiful grown-ups living lives of excess do.” He writes tenderly of how his parents first met in 1977, when Michael was 32 and Diandra was 19, and how they were married eight weeks later. “Somebody that’s traveled and been through some stuff.”Īs Douglas recounts in “Long Way Home,” he, too, has been to some places and seen some things: the lavish homes in New York and Santa Barbara, Calif., where he grew up the elite private schools that admitted and later expelled him the fountain where he crashed a sport utility vehicle after snorting crank and fleeing a Secret Service agent the liquor stores and motels he stuck up as much for the illicit thrills as for the money and the prison cells where he watched inmates fight each other with padlocks attached to shoelaces.īut the author is not the only one on display. “To me they represent the explorer - a man’s man,” he said. On this day he was dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt that covered an assortment of tattoos across his chest, and he wore a wristband held together by a charm shaped like a ship’s anchor. Douglas is 40, with a quiff of reddish-brown hair and his father’s distinctively narrow facial features.