The other read WINE BY THE GLASS, but we didn’t drink by the glass-we drank by the pint and the quart and the gallon … and vodka, not wine. There were two signs over the bar: the one under all the headshots read WHERE THE STARS DINE. It’s my favorite movie for a reason.Įvery evening, I would head to the Formosa Café on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood with my friends. I lived in a perpetual state of Groundhog Day.

It was also the year I immigrated to the United States, a lost Canadian kid with a dick that didn’t seem to work, heading to Tinseltown to live with his father. That was the year of the Los Angeles Olympic Games, a golden time of high sun and muscled excellence, of a hundred thousand people packed into the Coliseum and the Rose Bowl, where Mary Lou Retton needed a 10 to win the gymnastics all-around and nailed it, and where Carl Lewis won four gold medals by running really fast and jumping really far. World-class amateur gymnasts, sprinters, discus throwers, pole vaulters, basketball players, weight lifters, show jumpers and their horses, swimmers, fencers, soccer players, synchronized swimmers, media from all around the globe, officials and sponsors and agents … oh, and one fifteen-year-old also-amateur tennis player from Canada, they all washed up in Los Angeles during the summer of 1984, though only one was doing a big geographic. It seemed like the whole world was walking through the arrivals lounge of LAX that summer. There’s fresh Diet Coke in my glass, and a full pack of Marlboros in my pocket. I’m also working on the second draft of a screenplay. I’ve really gotten into art in the last few years, and if you look close enough, you’ll find the odd Banksy or two. This morning I’ve been busy hanging art on my walls (or rather, having them hung-I’m not so handy). It’s a gorgeous spring day in Los Angeles. (My real house is down the street being renovated-they say it will take six months, so I figure about a year.) A pair of red-tailed hawks is circling below me in the canyon that brings the Palisades down to the water.

I’m writing this in a rented house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. And nobody comes back from a perforated bowel, aspiration pneumonia, and an ECMO machine. Nobody ever thinks that something really bad is going to happen to them. Unflinchingly honest, moving, and uproariously funny, this is the book fans have been waiting for. Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is an unforgettable memoir that is both intimate and eye-opening-as well as a hand extended to anyone struggling with sobriety.

Friends lovers and big terrible thing