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

by David Sheff

Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself. At my worst, I even resented Nic because an addict, at least when high, has a momentary respite from his suffering. There is no similar relief for parents or children or husbands or wives or others who love them.

The truth is I never set out to write Beautiful Boy. For the years Nic was using, on the streets – dying, I was in complete and utter turmoil. Writing served a purpose. In the book I wrote about the ways writing helped me get through anguished and sleepless nights. Writing also helped (a little) make sense out of the chaos in my brain. The point is that there was no self-censorship, just expurgation. I wasn’t thinking about the fact that others might read my secret thoughts. Then, when I decided to turn the raw writing into a book, my initial instinct was to edit out whatever embarrassed, shamed, or otherwise horrified me. I omitted the scene in which I smoked pot with Nic when he offered me a joint. I elided the references to my appalling behavior that preceded my divorce from Nic’s mom. And I cut some of my darkest thoughts. But I reinstated them all because I decided that the book would only be meaningful if it was true. Complete and unvarnished. I wish I’d been patient and understanding in ways I wasn’t. I did sometimes resent Nic and sometimes was enraged at him. I didn’t want to admit it, because I felt people might judge me – “how can you be angry at a child who’s suffering in the ways Nic was.” Instead, countless people wrote and said they’d felt what I’d felt and felt guilty for it. It comforted them to know they weren’t the only one. Going through this or any other life challenge is hard. I learned that we have to let ourselves feel the stress, pain, outrage, anger, guilt – all of it. A Buddhist teacher said, “We aren’t our worst thoughts.”