new memoir

Movie stars are an endangered species. They still exist, sure. Their beautiful faces still fill 50-foot screens, beaming down on us. Yet, there is a shortage of, say, Michael Douglas. A man who, over the span of decades, played an American president, a troubled detective, and a Wall Street tycoon so convincingly that the FBI recruited the actor to do a PSA for investment bankers about the perils of financial fraud.

The night before I meet Michael Douglas on Zoom, I have a hard time sleeping. I want to be well-rested before I meet the leading man — perhaps one of the last leading men from an era in Hollywood that felt limitless. What do I mean by that? He’ll tell you. His new memoir details his movie-making career as a prolific producer and actor, along with his affair with his “Romancing the Stone” co-star Kathleen Turner, mudslides in Mexico, snorting cocaine with O.J. Simpson, encounters with Princess Diana and screaming matches with Paul Verhoeven that end in blood. In short: the life of a movie star.

“People say to me: Michael Douglas. When I see your name, I don’t know what I’m going to get, but I know it’s going to be good,” Michael Douglas says.

(David Urbanke / For The Times)

Halfway through our conversation, something unanticipated happens: Douglas reveals that he doesn’t quite see himself as a movie star. After gentle pushback, he elaborates. Instead, Douglas sees himself as a chameleon.

“People say to me: Michael Douglas. When I see your name, I don’t know what I’m going to get, but I know it’s going to be good,” he says.

He’s speaking from his home in New York. Behind him is a moody 18th-century Orientalist painting, its scene too indistinct for me to make out. His smiling face — which, like most American moviegoers, I had watched 50 feet tall in the dark — glows with warmth even on my laptop screen. It seems abnormal even to witness him in miniature.

To be clear: Michael Douglas is a movie star, whether or not he wants to cop to it over Zoom. It’s in his blood. His father, Kirk Douglas — born Issur Danielovitch to Russian Jewish immigrant parents — was a legendary actor whose shadow Douglas struggled to escape, as he details in the early chapters of his memoir. He spent his childhood on movie sets, watching his father spar with iconic directors like Stanley Kubrick. Michael Douglas was subject to violent and angry outbursts as well. “Dad’s volatility kept us on edge,” he writes. He felt suffocated by his father’s legacy, often hoping to shake the title of “Kirk Douglas’ son.”

Early in his career, Douglas left his starring role on TV’s “The Streets of San Francisco” after producing his first film, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which became a breakout success. On that film, he had to deliver the shattering news to his father that he was too old to play the lead — essentially, firing his father from his dream role. It was a betrayal. Instead, the role went to Jack Nicholson, who would later win an Academy Award for his humanizing portrayal of Randle McMurphy. The film won multiple Academy Awards, launching Douglas’ career as a heavyweight producer and later an actor. Escaping the shadow of being Kirk Douglas’ son has been a lifelong battle for the actor.

(Grand Central Publishing)

Occasionally, inheritance can be a burden. In his own life, Douglas details how he was a distracted father and husband who lost sight of his son, Cameron Douglas. During Cameron’s childhood, Douglas was elsewhere — on location in the Mexican jungle in “Romancing the Stone,” then a disastrous film production in Morocco for “Jewel of the Nile” that included a fatal plane crash that resulted in three crew members’ deaths. To cope with the breakneck pace of show business, Douglas sought refuge in women, cocaine and work.

Cameron’s troubled youth reached a crescendo when he was sentenced to five years in federal prison for drug smuggling, with an additional sentence for drug possession in prison — serving seven years in the end. It was enormously painful for Douglas, who also struggled with addiction, and had sought out treatment to provide an example to his son.

In a late chapter, he recalls confiding in Rob Reiner, who also had a son who struggled with addiction issues. In the memoir, Douglas addresses the killing of Rob and Michelle Reiner in December 2025; their son Nick has been charged with murder. “We both had sons with serious drug issues and we both, at times, had been at the end of our rope,” Douglas writes. “It was a heartbreaking confessional for us, but I know we gave each other some measure of comfort during the hard times.”

Why trudge through movie history, turning over every stone and every wound, in a nearly 500-page memoir? Because, according to Douglas, it’s time.

“Your 80s may be a good time to share,” the actor says, who recently turned 82. “People interested in movies, we give them a certain insight into the process, and maybe they could learn something. For others, it’s just gossip.” His battle with Stage 4 oral cancer brought the contours of his life into stark relief, sharpened by seven weeks of radiation and chemotherapy. His official diagnosis was tongue cancer, but he told the public he had throat cancer, hoping to stall speculation in the press about the possibility of disfigurement — and, more specifically, the prospect of losing his tongue. It was isolating, and Shane Salerno — the memoir’s co-author — stayed by Douglas’ side.

Michael Douglas.

(David Urbanke / For The Times)

As much as Douglas’ memoir, “One Helluva Ride,” is a revealing and delightful account of a life in show business, it is also a love letter to California — a place where Douglas spent much of his adult life, beginning at UC Santa Barbara. The college travel brochure read: campus by the sea. “I remember the cover of it was a guy walking down the beach with a surfboard, two girls in two-piece bathing suits. In 1963, I never saw a two-piece bathing suit back east.” He was sold.

The California years made an impression. Douglas is still, at heart, a hippie. Raised in stiff East Coast prep culture, he was reborn in the California sunshine. “I transferred into becoming a hippie, influenced by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, hallucinatory drugs, and the world that existed in the early ‘60s in San Francisco.”

Strangely, Douglas argued that some of the utopic sentiments of the 1960s are returning. “People are beginning to look back at that time, and realize how important family is — cooperation, sharing,” he says. “Socialism is not a four-letter word or something that’s terrible. There are other things to pursue in life other than just making money.”

“Your 80s may be a good time to share,” Michael Douglas says.

(David Urbanke / For The Times)

Like the characters he portrayed, Douglas is far from perfect. He admits that he struggled — in his first marriage, and later as a father. After marrying Diandra Luker, Douglas was unfaithful, having relationships with co-stars, most notably Turner on the set of “Romancing the Stone” in the Mexican jungle. The two denied the relationship for years. Now, with Turner’s blessing, Douglas writes about their involvement in his memoir.

Before Turner, there was Diane Thomas, the film’s waitress-turned-screenwriter, with whom Douglas had an affair. Thomas’ life was tragically cut short in a car accident involving a Porsche that Douglas had gifted her.

Then there were the rumors. On the set of “Basic Instinct,” some speculated that Douglas and Sharon Stone were having an affair. They weren’t, he explains. Douglas was instead locked in a power struggle with director Verhoeven, who, during one particularly heated argument with the actor, suffered a burst artery in his nose, turning the confrontation into a bloody scene. Douglas, meanwhile, was involved with another co-star, Jeanne Tripplehorn. “They were so focused on a possible relationship between Sharon and me, they missed the real relationship happening between me and Jeanne,” he writes.

When he and his current wife, actor Catherine Zeta-Jones, made it official, Douglas went to the other room to make breakup calls to five other women. (By this point in the memoir, Douglas has enough goodwill to pass this off as charming.) “From the moment I met Catherine, and we formed our family, I was a new man,” he writes.

The memoir enshrines Douglas’ petty show-business grievances too: a repaired grudge against David Letterman, a TV co-star who stole his longtime girlfriend, and a bouquet sent to Julia Roberts to apologize for his drunken buffoonery. In Douglas’ words: “There’s two or three people that I share my hostilities with.” He clashed with Brian De Palma, who was originally attached to direct “Fatal Attraction” and tried to have Douglas fired. De Palma underestimated Douglas and was replaced by Adrian Lyne. Years later, De Palma apologized, but Douglas rejected it.

It is impossible to tell the story of Douglas’ career without the women he encountered. The films he championed helped establish a new type of female lead — in all their powerful, morally ambiguous and deranged glory. “An actress was not allowed to play a villain,” he says. In “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the actor struggled to cast Nurse Ratched. “A whole number of leading actresses turned that part down until we found Louise Fletcher, who went on to win an Oscar.”

For Glenn Close, Sharon Stone and Kathleen Turner, acting opposite Michael Douglas was transformative. After her role as a murderous, sex-crazed bisexual in “Basic Instinct,” Stone became one of the biggest stars of the 1990s and earned an Oscar nomination for Martin Scorsese’s “Casino.” Close‘s portrayal of the mistress-turned-lovesick psychopath in “Fatal Attraction” earned the actor her first lead Oscar nomination after three supporting nods. Turner went from being primarily known as the sexy femme fatale of “Body Heat” to a Golden Globe-winning star with box-office clout after her collaboration with Douglas. Sure, she sued him, too, but their friendship survived.

However, it wasn’t until his role as Gordon Gekko, the fast-talking, impulsive tycoon in 1987’s “Wall Street,” that Douglas was in full force, winning an Academy Award for lead actor. Directed by Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone, Douglas delivered an unforgettable performance about the dangers of unchecked capitalism and greed. At an early New York screening, Douglas recalls Wall Street traders being stunned by the film’s stinging accuracy. “A lot of the Wall Street characters were there, very cocky at the time; they all were shocked because we caught them.”

To his surprise, Wall Street financiers approached him on the street to praise Gekko — anointing him as their hero. “I said, ‘I was the villain.’ ‘No, no, no,’” he said. “So it showed me a lot.”

It speaks to Douglas’ gifts as an actor that he could transcend the caricature of white male entitlement he portrayed with such precision. In “Falling Down,” filmed during the 1992 uprising triggered by the Rodney King verdict, Douglas plays an unemployed defense worker, a man so consumed by disillusionment and blinded by his own sense of victimhood that he cannot recognize the harm he inflicts on others. The character would prove eerily prescient, anticipating an archetype that would take shape in the decades to come. An entire generation mistaking the actor’s brilliance as an invitation.

Perhaps that is the strange thing about being a movie star: Audiences decide who you are, and what you mean to them. For a chameleon, an actor who spent a lifetime resisting other people’s definitions of him, that might be the ultimate paradox.

As our conversation winds down, I remind him of his immense contributions to filmmaking, through producing and acting. It seems redundant, but I say it anyway. His response is polite.

“Quirky,” he said. “‘Falling Down,’ ‘The War of the Roses’ — I love those quirky films.”

“I’m proud of my movies,” he says. “I’m very proud of my movies.”

Connors is a culture journalist in L.A. She covers books, food, entertainment and offbeat Los Angeles. She’s currently at work on a book of essays about tourism in all its forms.

It’s never been a more terrifying time to be an undocumented immigrant in America. Despite countless protests and pushback, ICE agents continue to patrol the streets. In July, Colombian immigrant Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Biddeford, Maine, during a routine traffic stop.

But what about the white-passing undocumented immigrants that seem to slip through the system? The ones who blend in so seamlessly (despite the thick accents of some)? We forget they are also legally not supposed to be here. Specifically, those from Eastern Europe, Russia and the former Soviet Union. And what about those young, desperate women who suggestively posed for the camera as the Soviet Union collapsed all around them, hoping to be chosen by an American man?

Katya Suvorova’s searing debut memoir, “Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter: A Memoir from the Child of a Mail-Order Bride,” out Sept. 29, is a heart-wrenching tale of immigration that pulls back the velvety red curtain to reveal one story behind the over-sexualized stereotypical post-Soviet mail-order bride narrative so ingrained in post-Cold War U.S. culture.

My own family legally immigrated to the U.S. from Soviet Belarus in the early 1990s. I grew up with the Western media narrative that Eastern European women were submissive sex symbols, desperate for financial security. Some boys in school even assumed I was “easy” because I was Eastern European.

Mostly told from a child’s point-of-view, Suvorova’s “Ungrateful” traces their journey in the ’90s from Russia to the U.S. and life thereafter, as white-passing undocumented immigrants who illegally crossed the border from Mexico — with the help of a man who replied to her mother’s mail-order-bride ad in a catalog. A catalog Suvorova would find years (and many rich American stepfathers) later while cleaning out the garage, and realize her mother had lied to her. She was not, in fact, a model, posing for a Coca-Cola ad, but a young woman with a small child desperate to leave Russia behind for the West. When Suvorova confronts her mother after finding the catalog, her mother replies: “Everyone was doing it.”

Mail-order brides shaped early colonial America. Men were often the first to settle small Western frontier towns and would in turn grow lonely for companionship. Newspaper ads for brides were normalized and proliferated in 19th century America. According to historian Elliott West, “Some mining camps in Idaho in 1870 had nine men for every woman.” The truth is that love didn’t enter the picture when it came to marriage until about the 19th century with the Victorians; before then, marriage was more like a business contract, with dowries and cows alike.

Letter brides remained ubiquitous in 20th century America and were not stigmatized until the 1970s and 1980s when it became more apparent that mail-order immigrant brides from developing Southeast Asian and Eastern European countries were being abused and exploited. It wasn’t until 2005 that the U.S. passed the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA), which requires background checks and other precautions meant to protect foreign brides from domestic abuse, violence and exploitation. You don’t have to dig deep to see this narrative proliferated in our culture. Jeffrey Epstein mostly recruited Eastern European women into his international sex-trafficking ring.

Author Katya Suvorova

(Alcove Press)

Suvorova and her mother were not spared such indignities. Abuse, both psychological and physical, permeates the pages of “Ungrateful.” From one of her earliest childhood memories of watching her mother being abused while stuck in a closet to later tales of her mother’s forced alcohol abuse and estrangement from her own mother (Suvorova’s beloved Babushka), expertly executed by her stepfather Adam — the abuse ran rampant. Suvorova herself is a victim, neglected by her mother and forced to act as a child bride to please one of the husbands. Eventually, Suvorova realizes that it wasn’t just her mother that was sold in a catalog to an American suitor, but her young daughter (Suvorova) as well. It’s no surprise that Suvorova is estranged from her mother, a topic she covers often on her social media.

Of course, there is also the “gold digger” stigma. Suvorova writes about girls in school accusing her mother of being a gold digger, intentionally choosing rich boyfriends that would eventually become rich husbands while they lived in poverty and couch surfed. Suvorova’s mother would use creative tactics to find these men: hang out in five-star hotels or fancy athletic clubs. She would have them buy her computers, clothes and expensive jewelry she could sell later. She always ordered the priciest thing on the menu and bought gift cards when the men gave her money for groceries in case the relationship did not work out. She passed down these survival tactics to Suvorova like gospel. But, ultimately, it wasn’t money that her mother was after, it was green cards for them both, the permanence and safety of American citizenship: the American Dream.

In 2012, I dressed up as a mail-order bride for Halloween. I was 22, about the age Suvorova’s mother was when they immigrated to the U.S. I wore a tight sleeveless red American Apparel dress. Shiny fake patent leather pumps. A white veil from Claire’s at the mall. I covered myself in bits of cardboard, packing tape and foam peanuts and overdid my makeup with several coats of mascara and thick black eyeliner. I thought this costume was funny, clever, appropriating and reclaiming the narrative that haunted me all my life. I thought because of where I was born, I was allowed to do this. A notoriously blunt girl who I sensed didn’t like me approached while I was waiting for the bathroom. “What are you, a slut?” she said, scanning me like a barcode.

Suvorova’s memoir effectively shows the risks immigrants were willing to take to escape the collapse of the Soviet Union and the corruption (ruled by the KGB) that followed. Without explicitly diving in, her writing sheds light on today’s Russian corruption and Putin’s endless war with Ukraine, which is ultimately a war against the West. In fact, Suvorova and many antiwar Russian immigrants today are terrified to return to their motherland due to fear of imprisonment and retaliation, as one Los Angeles woman in 2024 learned the hard way upon landing in Russia, receiving a 12-year prison sentence for donating $51 to a Ukrainian charity.

In the building I grew up in and my parents managed, a young Russian “model” and her mother lived with a much older Persian man. Without much inquiry, I simply assumed she was a mail-order bride running from a traumatic past in the motherland, ordered from a catalog to make him dinner and vacuum his carpet. Closer to my age than not, she became my friend. Gifted me jewelry. Babysat me while my parents drank tea with her mother. I later found out she cheated on the Persian man, laid out her wedding dress on the soiled carpet while he was at work, and moved herself and her mother to Las Vegas, where she started a successful business and bought a house.

Suvorova’s story is not just about the childhood trauma inflicted by her mail-order-bride mother, but it’s a redemption story about reuniting with her beloved maternal Babushka and biological father. It’s a story of self-discovery. Not unlike the bestselling memoir “Educated” by Tara Westover, who overcomes an abusive childhood in a rural survivalist Mormon family. Like Westover, Suvorova finds shelter in books, school and an education.

Like all contemporary creative nonfiction writers and memoirists who are not celebrities, Suvorova must have been told somewhere down the line that in order to sell her memoir she must gain a following on social media, and she’s done just that. With about 95,000 followers on Instagram, Suvorova uses the platform to reveal earnest roundups, tips, tragic tales of estrangement and survival, and summaries of deleted chapters of “Ungrateful” as blocks of text over grainy film photos of her as a child. Suvorova’s very active social media presence sheds light on the current state of memoir and nonfiction publishing: You must have a platform to be read.

In a bizarre meta twist of events, Suvorova must sell herself and her story on social media, like her mother sold herself (and in turn her daughter) to those American husbands. In a stroke of marketing genius, some early copies of “Ungrateful” come with book-branded condoms.

And despite revealing in the memoir that she eventually did become an American citizen, Suvorova has since moved to Europe. When I asked Suvorova over Instagram direct message why she and her husband left the U.S. for Europe, she replied: “We left because I didn’t feel safe publishing my book about growing up as an undocumented kid under the current Trump administration. I have to take medicine that, if I were detained and could not take it, would lead to organ failure. We knew ICE was detaining U.S. citizens as well and decided not to risk it. In order to still publish the book and not be detained, we left the U.S.”

How many of us have been cruel immigrant daughters (or sons)? Ungrateful. Spoiled. Unaware or unwilling to acknowledge how much our parents have sacrificed to get us here. In the case of Suvorova’s memoir — although, she does acknowledge her white privilege — she certainly has a lot to be ungrateful for.

Ruzova is a Soviet-born writer based in Los Angeles. Her essay “The Sauna” was a notable in Best American Essays 2025.