Lucky Man: A Memoir

by Michael J. Fox

Over time, the rewards to the performer and the expectations of the audience grow unchecked, and everybody, each for their own reasons, is happy to forget that the whole exercise is based on illusion. A simple magic trick confined to a theater or television screen has mutated into a society-wide epidemic of magical thinking.

I became so intoxicated on the nectar of money and the ambrosia of unlimited possibility, that I fell completely under its influence, forgetting for a time that it wasn't real.

booze was an antidote to the self-consciousness that consumed me as an eccentric teenager in search of an identity.