Flaw with Sheen's memoir is the tragedy of his own life

Charlie Sheen tells all in his autobiography, which covers early stardom and a tumultuous adulthood. It's a compelling story waylaid by tales of debauchery

- By Louis Chilton

One of the unexpected turns in Charlie Sheen's new memoir, 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.

Ever since the months-long, highly public and reputation-ruining 2011 meltdown that saw him fired from Two and a Half Men and led to a succession of outrageous, drug-fuelled videos, Sheen has been synonymous with his addictions; his artistry as a performer feels almost entirely forgotten.

And yet, the specifics of Sheen's life offer several interesting insights into the industry. His father, Martin Sheen, rose to fame as a stellar actor in films such as Badlands and