Why Josh Brolin Aims for Sobriety After Trying Acid at 13 (Exclusive)

Josh Brolin has a bright future ahead of him after a rough past.

The actor, 56, gets candid in the upcoming memoir From under the truck about his experience with drugs and violence and spoke with PEOPLE about his journey for a story in this week’s print issue.

In his book, out November 19, the No country for old men star said he took acid for the first time with his Cito Rats surfing group and was stabbed on the street in Costa Rica in 2013 after being asked for a cigarette or money by a stranger.

Brolin wrote that he was “stabbed in the navel,” which ultimately saved his life. “The umbilical cord is the tightest ligament in the body, and it lowered the knife enough to prevent it from hitting any vital parts,” he wrote.

During the harrowing experience, the actor and his wife Kathryn waited outside their hotel and for an ambulance. After she brought him his phone, he called his ex-wife Alice Adair – the mother of his two eldest children – to tell her what happened. “I know what I have to do, but you’ll have to handle it,” she told him.

“She will talk to the children about what I loved most about them, about what they meant to me and how I know they will grow into a future that they can be proud of and not ashamed of because of,” he wrote.

Now Brolin is living a sober life after a 2013 interaction with his 99-year-old grandmother.

While appearing on Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson’s podcast Where everyone knows your name in September, the actor reflected on his last night of drinking after telling them he hit rock bottom and “way worse than (that)” at 15.

Regarding his last drunken night, he recalled, “There was a hit and run at Del Taco,” where he “woke up on the sidewalk.”

“I didn’t know where my car was, and that wasn’t that rare,” Brolin said. “It was just, you know, the 400th time it happened.”

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But that night, the Marvel alum was supposed to pick up his brother so they could visit his grandmother, who was “on her deathbed.” He continued: “Anyway, I woke up on the sidewalk, walked in. My brother called me. ‘Where are you?’ Collected him and went into the hospital in the end.”

When he walked into the hospital room, he said his grandmother “raised her head and looked at me and smiled and that was it.”

It was this interaction that inspired him to change for the better. “I was done. I said, ‘If this woman could get through 99 years on life’s terms, how dare I?’ ” Brolin explained. “I was 45 years old and I had gotten away with a lot, been in jail nine times, done a little bit of anything. So I thought, I wonder if I could do that half of life like that and then do this half. of life like this. Then I get to live two lives and not just one.”

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Speaking with PEOPLE in an exclusive interview for this week’s print issue, Brolin reflected on his current life and long marriage to Kathryn, his wife of eight years.

“The only thing you can change is yourself,” he says of the lessons he’s learned about love. “And drinking probably won’t help the relationship if you reacted to alcohol like I did.”

Brolin, who is father to four — Trevor Mansur, 36, and Eden, 29, with Adair and daughters Westlyn Reign, 6, and Chapel Grace, 3, with Kathryn — says his current life “is more raw. More naked.”

“The fear is still there, but I just don’t care too much about it. That’s the beauty of age, man. I wouldn’t want to be in my 20s again,” he says. “I just have no interest in going backwards. As crazy as life makes me sometimes, and as frustrated as I get with myself, I’m really like, ‘What a gift.'”

From under the truck cwill be released on November 19 and can be pre-ordered now wherever books are sold.