Reaction to Beautiful Boy

Beautiful Boy

Reaction to Part I and Part II: Beautiful Boy

Stay up late

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, wondering if and when the boy would come home. "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 should have lied and kept my drug use hidden" he muses (Sheff 2008:52). He thought that honesty was the best policy and such an open dialogue would facilitate a transparent relationship with his son. He was wrong: ultimately, at the end of Part I Nic ends up in what would be a series of rehabs to deal with the boy's spiraling addiction, an addiction that far exceeded his father's pull towards drugs. For while Sheff's experimentation seems more of an extension of the culture of the 1960s, Nic's addiction became part of his life, his sense of self, and only reason for living.

Part II: His drug of choice

In Part II of Sheff's memoir, Sheff describes his reaction to the revelation that his son is not simply addicted to marijuana and alcohol (drugs which have a certain cache of 'normalcy' despite their potential to be abused) but also to crystal methamphetamine ('meth'). Sheff describes the one time he experimented with this drug, which he found to be uniquely powerful in terms of its hold over the body and mind. He regards using meth to be a step beyond 'normal' addiction (Sheff 2008: 108). Before, his son's addiction had been normalized, not simply in his son's reactions and defensiveness to his father's inquiries about his whereabouts but also in the words of the therapists to whom Sheff brought his child. Meth was originally touted as a drug that enhanced vitality before its side effects came to be known but is so addictive it is almost impossible to be a 'casual user.' Sheff cites evidence that meth users tend to be more violent than other types of drug users because of the effects of the drug (which can people awake for as long as 15-hour stretches of time) (Sheff 2008: 113).