One of the rare books selected for sale by Starbucks to be sold in its more than 7,000 company-operated locations in the U.S., ‘Beautiful Boy’ by David Sheff does illustrate how the most clichéd insights into addiction can also be the most accurate.
The book provides the firsthand father’s perspective on his teenage son’s addiction. It is an insightful memoir detailing David Sheff’s son Nic’s descent into methamphetamine addiction and how Sheff struggled to help his son on the road to recovery.
The book is heightened by its subject - methamphetamine addiction, which exerts such body-snatching effects on those who succumb to it. A cycle of madness and decline prompted by crystal meth goes well beyond the horrors of garden-variety substance abuse. Also, by a medical emergency that befell David. In the midst of weathering the grief and worry that came with watching Nic deteriorate, David Sheff suffered a brain hemorrhage.
Though Nic has also written his own book, ‘Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines.’ But it was not a Starbucks book selection. It was published concurrently with ‘Beautiful Boy’ and Nic’s version is rougher, and has slang.Like other such books, ‘Beautiful Boy’ voices the same helplessness and arrives at the same set of conclusions. But Sheff’s compelling account as a father who placed himself tearfully at the center of his son’s troubles remains so addictive that you would keep hoping to discover something new. He traces Nic’s unhappiness back to his own divorce — and to his own drug use, which he once regarded as a relatively harmless recreation. Mortified that he ever found it funny, and that he tried father-son marijuana smoking as a way of bonding with Nic. He went through stages of denial and helplessness and felt like giving up on his son but couldn’t. Sheff hopes by sharing his experience, he will have the chance to connect with others who have had or are currently having similar experiences with a loved one’s drug abuse. In his book, he wrote – “People outside can vilify me. They can criticize me. They can blame me. Nic can. But nothing they can say or do is worse than what I do to myself every day. ‘You didn’t cause it.’ I do not believe it.” |