The actor-author can often be a dicey proposition—sometimes you get lucky and end up with something delightful, like Tina Fey’s thoughtful and funny memoir Bossypants. But more often than not you end up way down in the other direction, what veterans of the field call “Sean Penn territory.” And while we would certainly never encourage an actor as talented as, say, Vincent D’Onofrio to hang up his acting boots for a bit and turn to text, we have to confess: The man tells the sort of beautiful, haunting monkey shit story that the American literary public is obviously clamoring for.