The Most Shocking Revelations from Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy: His Connections with Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor, Plus Turning Down Star Wars.Linh

Al Pacino is getting candid about his storied career in film, his many encounters with iconic figures in Hollywood over the years and some of the most traumatic moments of his life in his new memoir.

In his book Sonny Boy, out Oct. 15 from Penguin Press, Pacino, 84, opens about many of his encounters with celebrities — some of whom he considers close friends — as well as the more difficult situations he has found himself in over the years, including his battle with alcoholism and his mother’s mental health struggles.

“It was due,” he told PEOPLE of his decision to write the memoir. “I’m in my 85th year. When you get there and you start experiencing age, you understand why they do put things down.”

The Scarface actor titled the book after the childhood nickname his mother, Rose, gave him from the Al Jolson song of the same name. Pacino also told PEOPLE that he wanted to leave a record for his loved ones, including his four children, Julie, 34 (with acting coach Jan Tarrant), 23-year-old twins Anton and Olivia (with actress Beverly D’Angelo) and Roman, 16 months (with producer Noor Alfallah).

He added: “At least according to me, I’ve had quite a big life.”

Here are the biggest bombshells from Pacino’s memoir, Sonny Boy, available now wherever books are sold.

His mother attempted suicide when he was a boy

According to Pacino, one of the most difficult early memories from his childhood growing up in a tenement apartment in New York City’s South Bronx, where he lived with his mom and grandparents, came when he was just six years old. Although he writes that he didn’t understand what exactly happened at the time and that it was “period of time that is kind of a blank to me,” he does recall the morning it happened.

Pacino recalled that his mom was crying and kissing him as she laced up his shoes and dressed him in a sweater so he could play outside with some children in the neighborhood. After heading outside to play, he suddenly saw people running towards his apartment.

“Someone said to me, ‘I think it’s your mother.’ I didn’t believe it. I thought, How could they say a thing like that? My mother? That’s not true.”

“This was not explained to me; I had to piece together what had happened for myself,” he wrote elsewhere, “Years later, I made the film Dog Day Afternoon, and one of its final images, showing John Cazale’s character getting brought away on a stretcher, already dead, would make me think of the moment I saw my mother brought out to that ambulance and taken away.”

He turned down a role in ‘Star Wars’

Although Pacino has spoken about it candidly before, he opened up about his decision to pass on the role of Han Solo in the 1977 film Star Wars: A New Hope, which famously went to Harrison Ford.

“After The Godfather, they would have let me play anything. They offered me the role of Han Solo in Star Wars. So, there I am, reading Star Wars,” he wrote.

“I gave it to Charlie,” he continued, referring to Laughton. “I said, ‘Charlie, I can’t make anything out of this.’ He calls me back. ‘Neither can I.’ So I didn’t do it.”