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David Sheff’s memoir is a powerful, painful story of a father trying to save his beloved son from an addiction to alcohol and drugs, particularly crystal meth. Meth, according to the experts Sheff cites in his book, is the worst of the addictive drugs to try to shake, and the author shows his pain, fear and sense of helplessness in the face of a monster he cannot tame.
Beautiful Boy has received a lot of press since its publication, and the book deserves it. Sheff was an experienced journalist before he before he wrote the essay that inspired this book for The New York Times Magazine. His writing style is friendly and open, and he takes the reader into his family, from Nic’s birth to Sheff’s divorce from Nic’s mother, into a second marriage and the births of his subsequent children. As a reader, you quickly begin to care about Nic and David, and wonder along with David why his wonderful, talented, gifted child is throwing his life away.
Sheff’s journalism background shines through the personal narrative as he searches for answers to the “why?” of addiction. He faces the questions any parent of an addicted child must face – why did this happen, how do I help you, what can I do – and seeks answers through interviews with drug counselors, family therapists, and research experts, though no one can offer him a concrete answer. We discover along with the author that there is no one real answer to any of these questions; there are multitudes of answers and lifetimes of pain inside families affected by addiction.
What Sheff does best in the story is write about his family, warts and all. Sheff tells the painful truth about his own history of drug use, his flaws as a parent, and the effects of his divorce on Nic. At no point does he let himself off the hook for his inadequacies and uncertainties as a father, and his honesty makes this a book, and a family, you come care about and want desperately to heal itself.
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Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction