The Book of Sheen: A Memoir

The narrative opens with Charlie Sheen’s birth on September 3, 1965, in New York City. When he was delivered, he wasn’t breathing due to an umbilical-cord strangulation. The obstetrician, Irwin Shaybone, resuscitated him aggressively while his mother, Janet, watched in distress and his father, Martin Sheen, prepared for last rites. The scene ends with the first cry and a narrow restoration of life. In gratitude, his parents gave him the middle name Irwin, making his legal name Carlos Irwin Estevez.

Now, Sheen reflects on the awkwardness of that name and the later shift to the name Charlie Sheen, but he accepts that the doctor’s “heroics” effectively restarted his life. Sheen argues that his childhood stutter, which he says still affects him, is tied to that moment in the hospital as it “still haunts” him.

Sheen recounts his first remembered family story, from early childhood, and he reflects on his uncertainty about memory itself. He states that recollection and events often diverge, and the images he remembers may come from old photographs, rather than lived moments.

At age two in New York, he was taken for his first surgery. As a distraction, his parents dressed him in a “very stylish Roy Rogers cowboy ensemble” (9), including hat, boots, spurs, and toy pistols.