Brand’s addictive personality

Russell Brand is an expert on addiction, said Judith Newman in The New York Times. The 42-year-old British comedian has been hooked on pretty much everything imaginable at one point or another in his life, including alcohol, heroin, pornography, sex, and especially celebrity. Brand, now 14 years sober, credits 12-step programs such as AA with saving him from himself. To that end, he’s written a characteristically eccentric self-help book to help others follow the same path, Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions. “My qualification is not that I am better than you,” Brand says, “but that I am worse.” All addiction, he has come to believe, has the same root: trying to fill an inner emptiness. “We are trying to solve inner problems externally—whatever it is in our lives that is missing. [Spiritual teacher] Eckhart Tolle said it perfectly: ‘Addiction starts with pain and ends with pain.’” Brand’s struggles aren’t entirely behind him, and he’s still a natural rebel, but he has settled into a soothing domesticity with his wife, their 10-month-old daughter, and his dog, Bear, a German shepherd. Brand describes the dog as his “abstracted libido.” “Even though he’s neutered, I think it was too little, too late; we’d have to chop off the entire back half of him,” Brand says. “He wants to eat life to death, in the most loving way imaginable. Which I identify with, because that’s, I think, what I used to want to do.”