Beautiful BoyA Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

A father watches his son succumb to drugs and despair.
Journalist David Sheff never anticipated that his most compelling subject would be his most personal one: his teenage son Nic’s harrowing spiral into crystal meth addiction. Building off his New York Times Magazine article “My Addicted Son,” Sheff poignantly details the ways a family reorganizes itself around a user — the inevitable denial, the excruciating wait for a call, the constant suspicion of lying and stealing, even the bizarre hope for an arrest (jail, after all, must be safer for the user than the streets). As Nic shuffles in and out of rehabs, David’s life becomes a vicarious hell of guilt, fear and helplessness.

But if Nic’s journey from swim meets and honor roll to weeklong binges with shared needles seems puzzling, that’s because David focuses less on how Nic got from Point A to Point B — Nic’s own memoir Tweak contains more insight in this regard — and more on why, and the ways he, as a parent, may have been responsible. In its searing, self-lacerating honesty, Beautiful Boy emphasizes that ultimately there is no logical narrative, no easy psychological profile to explain crippling dependency. Sheff can only share his own experience, interspersed with the latest neuroscience research about drug abuse and the occasional epigram from pop culture. Bleak as addiction is, perhaps that is as much comfort and wisdom readers in a similar situation can hope for.