When Charlie Sheen thinks back to the years he spent addicted to alcohol, cocaine, pills and crack, he remembers projectile-vomiting blood over his balcony. Or his hands shaking so severely that he couldn’t pour himself a glass of Patrón Silver.

These memories come back to him without warning, dangling over his thoughts like a mobile over a crib, when he is driving down the Pacific Coast Highway blaring Led Zeppelin, or watching the Cincinnati Reds at home. For nearly eight years, these thoughts, as disturbing as they are, have helped to keep him from crashing back into chaos.

On Dec. 12, 2017, Sheen — a four-time Emmy nominee for “Two and a Half Men,” and for a time one of Hollywood’s highest-paid television actors on a show with 15 million viewers per episode — got sober. He has been fairly quiet since then, teetering on the verge of becoming one of those what-happened-to-that-guy situations. In 2023, he appeared in a few episodes of the comedy series “Bookie,” which reunited him with his old “Two and a Half Men” boss/nemesis, Chuck Lorre. Clips of Sheen asserting that tiger blood runs through his veins no longer light up social media (though you can still find them). He is content hanging out in Southern California with his five kids and three grandchildren, getting smoothies and pedicures with his daughter Lola or watching sports.

He has also spent time alone at home writing a memoir, “The Book of Sheen,” due out from Gallery Books on Tuesday. For years, rumors have swirled about him. The book, along with the upcoming Netflix documentary “aka Charlie Sheen,” has him facing those rumors head on. Yes, all of them. He calls the book an “all-access, backstage pass to the truth.”

I met Sheen, 60, in August at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel & Bungalows in Santa Monica. The sunny California scene, with children splashing in the pool and tourists brunching at cafe tables, seemed a little cheery for a guy whose memoir begins with the line, “On September 3, 1965, in New York City, at 10:58 p.m., I was born dead.”