Beautiful Boy: A Heartbreaking Memoir of a Father's Struggle with His Son's Addiction and the Journey to Recovery

by David Sheff

Parents of addicts learn to temper our hope even as we never completely lose hope. However, we are terrified of optimism, fearful that it will be punished. It is safer to shut down. But I am open again, and as a consequence I feel the pain and joy of the past and worry about and hope for the future. I know what it is I feel. Everything.

I don’t remember ever explaining to Nic why I said “everything” to him. As I explain the book, I said it to express the mix of intense feelings when he was leaving to visit his mom in LA- I’m sorry and, most of all, I love you. Soon we said it when we talked on the phone. We said it at night when he was going to sleep. We said it and then I sang John Lennon’s song that still melts my heart: “Beautiful Boy.” “Darling boy.” Everything.” In a way I never could have, the writers of the movie (Felix Van Groeningen and Luke Davies) found a way to explain the full meaning of the small word when the dad David (played by actor Steve Carell) says, in his gentlest voice, that he loves his son (when Nic is young in the film) more than everything. The little boy asks, “Everything?” And the dad repeats, “Everything.” That scene brought tears. Over the years I’ve heard from (and still hear from) parents who tell me that after reading the book or seeing the movie, the word “everything” became part of their family, too: a way of describing how big their love is for their children, as big as everything.