One of the unexpected turns in Charlie Sheen’s new memoir, mock-brazenly titled The Book of Sheen, comes towards the end, when we finally reach the doorstep of Two and a Half Men. The hit sitcom gave Sheen his most well-known role and made him, for a time, the highest-paid actor on television. Here, though, there is no juicy behind-the-scenes reminiscing and little by way of gossipy anecdote. His eight years on the show are all but breezed over, subsumed by a granular recounting of his longstanding drug addiction. But that is, to a large extent, the story of Sheen.
There’s a metatextual component to this book, which devotes much of its first half to interesting and involved recollections about Sheen’s work on films such as Platoon and Wall Street, before his extracurricular misadventures steal focus. Sheen – now eight years sober, speaking to us as a quelled tornado – doesn’t glorify his drug use or womanising, but handles it with a sort of wry irreverence. He knows as well as anyone that it can’t be fenced into a chapter; his struggles aren’t some discrete facet of his celebrity, but the very essence of it.
