Beautiful Boy : A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction – David Sheff

What had happened to my beautiful boy? To our family?What did I do wrong? Those are the wrenching questions that haunted every moment of David Sheff ’s journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery. Before Nic Sheff became addicted to crystal meth, he was a charming boy, joyous and funny, a varsity athlete and honor student adored by his two younger siblings. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who lied, stole, and lived on the streets.David Sheff traces the first subtle warning signs: the denial, the 3 A.M. phone calls (is it Nic? the police? the hospital?), the rehabs.His preoccupation with Nic became an addiction in itself, and the obsessive worry and stress took a tremendous toll. But as a journalist, he instinctively researched every avenue of treatment that might save his son and refused to give up on Nic. Beautiful Boy is a fiercely candid memoir that brings immediacy to the emotional rollercoaster of loving a child who seems beyond help.

Books are a wonderful way to connect. You lend one out, you take one in, you learn read things you possibly wouldn’t have read otherwise. This one was lent to me by my roommate, and I think it was a success!

The book itself is the memoir of a father as he goes through the process of watching his son fall in and out of addiction. It’s an interesting perspective, to look at addiction from the outside. There is a lot of analyzation of cause, blame, and woulda-coulda-shoulda. To see the man try to figure out where his son’s addiction came from, stemmed from, even  from the earliest memories was extremely intriguing. Or at least to a psychological mind.

There was a good amount of dysfunction in his home but nothing that wasn’t normal. The boy’s parents were divorced early on in his life, both remarried, and he was shuffled between the two. His father did drugs earlier in his life– and smoked a joint with his son to prove a point. There was the somewhat alternative life that is sometimes connected with California, but like I said, none of this is so outrageously out there to say that any one of these things caused the addiction. It’s impossible to say that anything can in itself cause addiction. There’s the natural predisposition to addiction, which is where, I think, the boy’s father didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to say that his son had an addictive personality or wanted to fit in with a certain group, so he began to do drugs. It’s easier to put the blame on something else, even himself, but who can blame him?

All in all, I do think this was a very compelling memoir. It looked at all faucets of the boy’s addiction aside from his own viewpoints on it. It looked at the father’s history, the boy’s childhood and adolescence, the world around him. What I think I most picked up on, though, was the feeling of love the father had for the son. It wasn’t saccharine or put on, not at all. You felt the love he felt through the memories he brought up, the smile on his face. You also felt his confusion at why this was happening. His anger when things were stolen, broken. His pain at the choices he had to make in order to try to help his son through tough love. The writing was clipped and straightforward, but it still came with all the emotions that such events could carry.

Finally, I really appreciated the fact that there was no ending. There was no tie up  conclusion stating that the son was now better forever and ever. It was real and open to the possibility that he will fall into his addiction again. Oh, and I should mention that the son has out a companion memoir, which I am interested to read. Oh, oh, and I should also also mention that this is a memoir sans disturbing images. FYI. .

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