Bruce Willis’ Daughter Tallulah Reveals Early Dementia Signs She and Other Family Members Missed

Tallulah Willis opens up about her father. The daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore recently penned an essay in which she touches on her personal demons and Bruce’s initial signs of dementia. Early this year, Bruce Willis’ family announced that he had suffered from aphasia, a neurological condition causing him to be unable to communicate or understand what he is saying. This symptom was a consequence of frontotemporal dementia, a progressive neurological condition that adversely affects his cognition and behavior on a daily basis. However, Tallulah wrote, “But I’ve known that something was wrong for a long time. 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 later mentioned that Bruce’s unresponsiveness grew, and she sometimes took it personally. Since he had had two babies with her stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, she thought he’d lost interest in her. Although this was what her teenage brain told herself: she wasn’t beautiful enough for her mother or interesting enough for her father, even though this couldn’t be further from the truth. “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,” she continued. “The truth is that I was too sick myself to handle it.” 

Tallulah revealed that for the last four years, she has 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.” In order to address the depression she experienced during her adolescence, she entered a Malibu residential treatment facility at the age of 25. Additionally, Tallulah was diagnosed with ADHD and started taking stimulant medication, which profoundly affected her life. “And like so many people with eating disorders, my sense of myself went haywire.” “While I was wrapped up in my body dysmorphia, flaunting it on Instagram, my dad was quietly struggling. All kinds of cognitive testing was being conducted, but we didn’t have an acronym yet. 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.” She continued, “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.” Tallulah noted, “yet I remained focused on my body.” 

“I know that trials are looming, that this is the beginning of grief,” Tallulah Willis, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore's daughter, says of her father’s aphasia diagnosis, “that whole thing about loving yourself before you can love somebody else—it’s real.” https://t.co/LPhj7GTZ0g

— Vogue Magazine (@voguemagazine) May 31, 2023

However, she recalls thinking that if her dad had been “his full self,” she’d like to think he’d never let her get to that size. “Maybe he’s a stereotypical father of a certain generation in that way, a doer who, if he had understood, might have scooped me up and said, ‘This is ending now.’” She mentions going to after her then-fiancé dumped her in June of last year, her family stepped in and sent her to Driftwood Recovery in Texas, where she was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. When she left Texas in October, she said she “felt a lot better.” Now she “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.” “Every time I go to my dad’s house, I take tons of photos—of whatever I see, the state of things. I’m like an archaeologist, searching for treasure in stuff that I never used to pay much attention to. I have every voicemail from him saved on a hard drive. 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.” 

Tallulah mentions that dementia has not affected his mobility and that “he still knows who I am and lights up when I enter the room. (He may always know who I am, give or take the occasional bad day.” According to her, FTD differs from Alzheimer’s dementia in that, at least early on, the former is characterized by language and motor deficits. In contrast, the latter is characterized by memory loss. “I keep flipping between the present and the past when I talk about Bruce: he is, he was, he is, he was,” she said. “That’s because I have hopes for my father that I’m so reluctant to let go of. I’ve always recognized elements of his personality in me, and I just know that we’d be such good friends if only there were more time. He was cool and charming and slick and stylish and sweet and a little wacky—and I embrace all that.  The famous daughter concludes by admitting that it wasn’t easy growing up in such a famous family, “struggling as I did to find a patch of light through the long shadows my parents cast. But more and more often, I feel like I’m standing in that light” Tallulah’s sister Rumer gave birth to a baby girl in April, and Bruce and Demi have become grandparents. “There’s this little creature changing by the hour, and there’s this thing happening with my dad that can shift so quickly and unpredictably,” she said. “It feels like a unique and special time in my family, and I’m just so glad to be here for it.”