I like Jim Harrison's essays better than his novels and his appetite better than his essays. I now like all three better than his memoir, Off to the Side, which is a jumbled mess and filled with more dropped names than a dumped postal bag. Things move along swimmingly while Harrison is a poor, starving poet and novelist, but as soon as he finds success in Hollywood, the aggressive boasting begins and really never lets up. Seemingly every major actor and director wanted to stay up all night with Jim drinking troughs of brandy and snorting bushels of blow. Scantily clad starlets are always the scenery. Jim charms everyone, but finally comes to loathe the collaborative nature of film that forces his loss of control over the initial vision of the screenplay. He still tells us the hundreds of thousands of dollars he's paid for the failures, and his inability to keep any of it is supposed to read as proof of his spiritual nature.

That meanness out of the way, the first half is Harrison at his best, which generally means full-breasted prose delivering the man's limitless appetite for food, drugs and booze. In between, he offers an old drunk's wisdom. Nothing shockingly new, but sagacious reminders-

Life is more than a self-improvement plan.

You can't quit anything until it gets in your way (actually, this one's from his long-time buddy Thomas McGuane).

The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit.

You can build a conceivably perfect life and then one day notice that it's suffocating you.

Everything could have been otherwise.

He's especially good on the battle of regret over the contingencies of the past as you look back on that unbearable lightness of being. He's also knowing and poetic on the necessity of breaking routine and the mentally invigorating act of getting out on the road with no apparent destination. And he writes better than anybody at Modern Drunkard about the body-Nazis and their victory over the pleasures of ingestion. That said, the whole thing has obviously been stitched and tied together with string by an editor with no thumbs, and you have to wade through a wedding list of celebrity names in the second half before you come to any nuggets worth writing in your little black book. Let Jim write 1000 words on the right sauce for venison, but no more literary excursions through the sordid days of Hollywood past. Just stick with the gastric and we can still be friends.