Ron Perlman’s Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir

Ron Perlman’s Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir is a must read for any movie lovers or wannabe filmmakers, especially actors. Perlman’s memoir uses a narrative device which I normally hate-he starts at a pivotal point in his life then goes to the beginning, arrives at the opening scene again and then we finally get a linear narrative. Once I got past that point, I found Ron Perlman’s Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir impossible to put down. It did not help that Perlman’s childhood was filled with love for baseball, which I find impossible to relate to as a sports atheist. I’m not sure why, but there are moments where Perlman uses different typeface to interject and further elaborate a point that he is making. This move makes sense when someone else wrote the passage, but it is confusing when he wrote it. Other than these narrative foibles, I was incredibly moved by Ron Perlman’s Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir. If Perlman, one of the most amazing living character actors of our time, has had a difficult time getting work or an agent or other seemingly objective markers of success, then the rest of us can just buckle down and be excellent without looking for external validation. Perlman is incredibly frank about his personal struggles with mental illness in his family and what he did to guard against any mental vulnerabilities which threatened his life. Perlman gets positively evangelical when it comes to therapy and the sanctity of telling a story. Perlman written, “When I think of myself as that kid everybody made fun of, I know his pain better than anyone and, instead, I treat that boy right.” As if that was not enough of a reason to love him, to discover that Perlman is not only a New Yorker, but is part of a multiracial family and shares some political and cultural proclivities with me made me want to do a back flip and hang out with him. Readers who are sensitive to profanity should probably skip Ron Perlman’s Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir, but everyone else who loves Perlman should jump right in.