The Book of Sheen: A Memoir

The Book of Sheen is a 2025 autobiography by actor Charlie Sheen. The book reframes Sheen’s tabloid-saturated downfall through his account of childhood on film sets, meteoric fame, addiction, and long-fought-for sobriety. Told from the first-person perspective, the book gives insight into Sheen’s mindset during many of his most infamous scandals and incidents.

This guide refers to the 2025 e-book edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of ableism, animal cruelty, animal death, mental illness, addiction, substance use, sexual content, death, and physical abuse.

Summary

Charlie Sheen is born Carlos Irwin Estevez in New York City on September 3, 1965, after a delivery-room crisis in which the umbilical cord cut off his air. Dr. Irwin Shaybone revives him, and the family honors the physician by giving Charlie the middle name Irwin. In adulthood, Sheen links his childhood stutter to that birth trauma.

The family moves often due to Martin Sheen’s acting work, culminating in a formative year in Mexico during the filming of Catch-22, where Charlie experiences a mix of wonder and dislocation that shapes his early sense of identity. Back in California, he and his brothers immerse themselves in Super 8 moviemaking, staging stunts with neighborhood friends and testing out roles behind and in front of the camera. In a second formative moment, the family relocates to the Philippines for Apocalypse Now, where Sheen absorbs the grind of location work, extreme heat, and the daily mechanics of a major production while witnessing both hardship and resourcefulness.

As a teenager in Malibu, Sheen balances school, friends, and a growing interest in performance. He forges a friendship with Chris Penn while drifting toward a film-centric social world based on the home Super 8 projects. Small acting jobs and Hollywood proximity segue into larger opportunities, and Sheen’s major breakthrough comes with Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Before filming, Sheen endures a military-style boot camp, an initiation that he later credits with preparing the ensemble for the physical and mental demands of the shoot. The film is a commercial and critical success, turning Sheen into a celebrity.

The success of Platoon leads directly to his next film, Wall Street, where Sheen struggles with a steep increase in dialogue and pressure, and the director’s expectations intensify following Platoon’s award recognition. Additional studio features consolidate Sheen’s bankability through the late 1980s and early 1990s, even as heavy nightlife and on-set temptations erode his discipline and push him toward periodic interventions. He begins to rely on alcohol and drugs to cope with the pressure. His relationships crumble, and his movie roles become less lauded.

By the late 1990s, Sheen’s addiction escalates. After working on the TV film Rated X, Sheen meets showrunner Gary David Goldberg, a relationship that becomes the bridge into a television series, Spin City. In September 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Goldberg frames the set’s mission as a weekly act of continuity and unity, and Sheen’s ensemble carries on with production while the news still dominates the city. The show completes episodes reliably on schedule and budget.

During this period, Sheen begins a relationship with Denise Richards that intensifies on set and then off set, progressing from their first baseball-centric date to an engagement announced amid industry approval. In 2002, he wins a Golden Globe for Spin City, then navigates the uncertainty around the April 2002 season finale, as the series status hangs in the balance.

After Spin City, Sheen pursues his next television anchor. In early 2003, he meets Chuck Lorre at Warner Bros. and hears the pitch for a traditional multi-camera sitcom centered on two brothers and a child. After reading the script, he commits. In March 2003, the show is picked up to become a series while Sheen is in Vancouver working on Scary Movie 3, and in the fall, Two and a Half Men debuts strongly, despite the industry’s pivot toward reality programming. The ensemble chemistry with Jon Cryer and the broader cast locks quickly, and the series establishes itself as a weekly ratings force. In parallel, Sheen’s family life intensifies. His daughter Sam is born in March 2004 amid rising marital strain and the emergence of Sheen’s use of prescription painkillers as a recurring stress outlet.

The next phase of Sheen’s life is defined by the friction between a stable work persona and unstable private habits. Episodes of pill dependency and off-set conflict accumulate through the mid-2000s, and his marriage to Richards fractures, even as Sheen remains professional. A second marriage, to Brooke Mueller, follows, and their twin sons are born premature. The twins spend weeks in neonatal care, and Sheen’s house becomes a contested site of legal, domestic, and substance-related stress.

By early 2011, after escalating disputes with producers, Sheen’s contract situation collapses, and he exits Two and a Half Men. The departure is followed by a media cycle that includes a 20/20 interview, a self-styled “Sober Valley Lodge” period in his home, then a Live Nation road show that opens in Detroit: Sheen is booed off the stage before intermission.

His public meltdown gives way to a failed television show named Anger Management and a private life marked by a revolving set of companions, heavy cocaine use, and logistical chaos that burns through his money and stamina. In late 2013, he becomes seriously ill and is hospitalized, where he receives a diagnosis of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

After his initial shock, Sheen stabilizes under antiretroviral therapy and reenters public view, eventually disclosing his status on television and encountering a second wave of opportunists who offer fringe cures and extractive deals. He briefly works with nonprofit and media platforms that seek to cast him as a cause figure, but he resists being positioned as a permanent spokesperson and returns to private management of his condition.

At the same time, he returns to heavy alcohol abuse. Extended stays in Mexico offer anonymity from Los Angeles scrutiny, but the alcohol triggers physiological crises like tremors and near-delirium episodes. He commits to a short voluntary detox in Arizona and a quick relapse soon after returning home. The years of 2016 and 2017 are characterized by intermittent family contact and unreliable routines. These years are punctuated by occasional obligations that he still honors, but the overall pattern is a contraction of focus around access to alcohol and the maintenance of a narrowed social circle.

The decisive break comes on December 10, 2017. After spiking his morning coffee with Scotch, Sheen realizes he cannot safely drive his daughter Sam to an appointment and calls a friend to take the wheel. The ride home, with his child silent in the back seat, becomes the moment when he recognizes that the only durable solution is immediate abstinence from alcohol. He quits drinking that day and does not resume. The subsequent years are uneventful by design. He reestablishes a reliable presence with his children, limits his circle, and reframes success as punctuality, steadiness, and the absence of a second persona.

In the Epilogue, Sheen reports a settled routine and a stripped-down measure of status. He notes that he wears a Timex, drives a Cadillac, and prefers the clarity of no to the entanglements that once followed every yes. He details the expansion of his family through the birth of grandchildren and aligns his sobriety timeline to the age of his twin granddaughters, marking an eight-year horizon free of alcohol and relapse behaviors.