Joey Buttafuoco Writing Tell-All Book

Buttafuoco tells TMZ the reason he's coming forward after so many years is due to a recent brush with death. He believes it's time to "clean the slate" and finally move on with his life -- aptly titling the memoir, "Closure."

Joey tells us, "Everyone thinks they know [the story] but they really don't."

Joey says the book his ex-wife Mary Jo Buttafuoco wrote back in 2009 is just an "angry account of an ex-wife who pieced together her own vision of why things happened. [She] had no knowledge of my life away from home."