Author- David Sheff
Series- N/A
Published- 2008, republished in 2018
Page Count- 390
Publishing House- Simon&Schuster (Scribner)
Rating- 5/5 stars
Note- this book focuses heavily around drugs, specifically meth. It also deals with heavy topics such as being an addict, mental health and near death experiences.
About the Author
David Sheff is an American author of the books Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America's Greatest Tragedy and Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction.
Taken from Wikipedia
Plot
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 honour 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 him. Beautiful Boy is a fiercely candid memoir that brings immediacy to the emotional roller coaster of loving a child who seems beyond help.
Taken from Goodreads
Opinions
I had never heard of David or Nic Sheff before I saw the trailer for the movie adaptation, which came out earlier this year. I had planned on seeing it, but life got in the way (as it does). So, when I saw the book in The Works for £3, I couldn't resist. I'm not one to normally agree with front cover blurbs, but the blurb (by the Daily Mail of all people) is accurate. It should be "mandatory reading for every teenager and every parent of one". I have to admit I knew next to nothing about being a drug addict and the recovery process. The things I did know came from various TV shows such as Patrick Melrose and Sherlock, both which feature drug addicts as central characters. Bizarrely, both star Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role.
Non-fiction is not normally a genre I gravitate towards. In the years since I have started my blog, I've only read three non-fiction books. As a reader, I think that knowing what you are reading about has happened makes it harder to read. Despite the fact that I wanted to know what was happening, at times the subject matter was upsetting and I had to stop myself from reading it. David Sheff, who is first and foremost a journalist, knows his way around words. The way this book was written meant that I was emotionally invested as a reader. Every time something bad happened to the Sheff family, I felt as if I was there and was experiencing it with them.
The narrative of this book starts with Nic as a teenager/young adult, coming home from university. David believes he has been clean this whole time, but it transpires that Nic has been using the entire time he was at university. It then flips to the Nic being born, and slightly before that, with his parents' marriage. We follow David and Nic as Nic grows up. As a reader, you are trying to pinpoint the moment Nic begins to fall down this path, but you can't. To the audience, it as if Nic starts using out of nowhere. By the end of the book, it is revealed that Nic is now an adult and has been clean since his early-mid twenties. You feel a sense of relief knowing that he is alive and well.
Something I particularly enjoyed about Sheff's writing was how he intertwined his own life with various points of Nic's. He shows how he was a reckless teenager and took drugs himself. We learn of his friend Charles, who was a drug addict, addicted to meth and who eventually died from complications from his addiction. Through this, Sheff is not parroting the usual "drugs are bad, I never did drugs, you are bad etc". It gives us as readers a refreshing take on what is becoming a reoccurring storyline in fiction and in everyday lives. I also enjoyed the way he included his family, especially his two younger children, Jasper and Daisy. Seeing their lives in all of this offered us moments of hope, yet it also showed us how it can affect children.
My only critique of this novel is the "info dumping" for want of a better word. At points it felt that Sheff would go off on tangents, giving us so much information about drugs and drug culture. During the first half of the novel, it was informative, but in the second half, it began to feel like a torrent of information. This could be because Sheff is a journalist and is used to fact over fiction, but for me as a reader, it felt a little bit distracting.
There is actually a "sequel" to Beautiful Boy. Nic Sheff wrote his own account of what happened to him and published it in a book called Tweak.
