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Beautiful Boy
Reaction to Part I and Part II: Beautiful Boy
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According to David Sheff's memoir of his son's addiction entitled Beautiful Boy, "I tried everything I could to prevent my son's fall into meth addiction. It would have been no easier to have seen him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a meth addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality…He was a trailblazer with meth, too, addicted years before politicians denounced the drug as the worst yet to hit the nation. In the United States, at least twelve million people have tried meth, and it is estimated that more than one and a half million are addicted to it" (Sheff 2008:9-10). From his father's perspective, his son was an angelic child who was given every advantage. Nic's addiction was inexplicable to Shaffer, yet also an extension of his son's generous and gregarious personality. Nic was always a sensation-seeker: a leader and a trailblazer with precocious intelligence. He was praised by coaches and teachers alike and even recruited to appear in a commercial as a kindergartener (Sheff 2008:34). This same boldness in the face of conventional wisdom, however, also caused Nic to deny the wise advice of others to stay off drugs. And ironically, while it was some of the 'good' characteristics within Nic that drove him to experiment, the drug turned him into a liar who hurt the people who cared about him the most like his father. His father sees his son as a stranger when he is on drugs -- instead of intelligent and witty, Nic becomes sullen, angry, and combative.
Nic's addition took over this father's life: his father found himself constantly waiting up for his son at night,...
"I became addicted to my child's addiction" (Sheff 2008:15). Nic even used going to AA meetings as an excuse to leave the house unsupervised and seek out drugs. Yet Sheff stresses that Nic is not fundamentally a 'bad' person nor was the family unusually dysfunctional. Yes, Sheff did divorce his wife and there were certain minor traumas, but nothing on the level to justify the suffering his son eventually inflicted upon himself. Almost obsessively, Sheff ruminates over Nic's past: Nic's progressive school, the loving attention both parents gave to the child, his determination to create a sense of normalcy for the boy while shuttling between two homes. There was some conflict between Nic and his stepmother, but nothing particularly serious -- or so it seemed on the surface.
Sheff also chronicles his own history with drugs in Part I of the memoir. As well as setting up a possibly 'too perfect' scenario of family life that was inevitably destined to go wrong, Sheff admits that he too experimented with drugs. In another irony, he thought that his personal experiences and warnings would protect his child from making the same mistakes, versus Sheff's contempt of his rather 'square' and puritanical parents. "Maybe I…
Reference
Sheff, D. (2010). Beautiful boy. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2008.
Beautiful Boy Reaction: Part III Whatever" of David Sheff's book Beautiful Boy addresses the author's attempt to get his son, Nic, into a treatment program. Nic's hostility towards his father is palpable, as is David's helplessness in the situation. Nic, though a boy by many societal standards, is an adult and David's power to compel him into a treatment program is incomplete. Furthermore, Nic's medical condition, as assessed by the addiction
Beautiful Boy by Sheff As a seasoned journalist and New York Times bestselling author, David Sheff is undoubtedly accustomed to covering stories both triumphant and tragic, which makes the haunting detachment which resonates throughout the Introduction section of his acclaimed work of nonfiction Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction both compelling and confounding. In describing the slow descent into methamphetamine addiction suffered by his son Nic, combining
These were Homer's two main goals while he was growing up in Coalwood. Although the rockets Valentine wished to see had yet to reach perfection, the fact that they were worthy of her interest convinced Homer that what he was doing was right, even when he felt discouraged by the results of the project itself. He had always assumed that being a football star was the only way to
Turner resented the boy's efforts, and accused the members of Homer's Rocket Club of starting a bomb club, much the same way Homer's father's friend Doc warned the boys that they would blow themselves to kingdom come. Mr. Turner only begins to look differently at what came to be known as the Rocket Club after the high school's football season was threatened, because of the school's poor academic record.
Rocket Boys Chapters 22-23 It is a tribute to Homer Hickman's prose that he can make a science fair, ordinarily a fairly dull and mundane event in the life of a high schooler, seem like an exciting and eventful thing, many times over, as the boys progress to different levels in the science fairs of that lead up to the national competition. Homer and the other rocket boys, against all odds,
Beautiful Life and the Impact of Too Much Sharing: What Happens to Young Persons When They Have No Guidance Daisy's and Jake's spiral downward does not begin with the Internet video that Daisy shares with Jake, who forwards it on to a friend. It begins earlier -- on the evening of their "hook up" in a house where there is no adult supervision. The Internet video is simply the manifestation