Beautiful Boy
Book Review, August 2007

"David Sheff's story is a first: A teenager's addiction from the parent's point of view," declares the back cover of this memoir by Inverness journalist Sheff, best known for his Rolling Stone and Playboy interviews with the likes of John Lennon and Jack Nicholson. Beautiful Boy is indeed gut wrenching, compelling, and incisive, a useful and, yes, addictive read-but it isn't a first. Other writers have written about their kids' descent into that particular circle of hell, including San Francisco writer Adair Lara (Hold Me Close, Let Me Go, Broadway, 2001), and Martha Tod Dudman (Augusta, Gone, Simon & Schuster, 2001), and me (Dirty, HarperSanFrancisco, 2003). But one in three families in America today contains a drug addict, so there is room on the shelf for Sheff's account of his son Nic's ongoing struggle with methamphetamine.

The book suffers from a tinge of hyperbole, uncalled-for in such a dramatic story, and from some jarringly clunky dialogue (one wonders, reading such lines as "We are going," "I will be fine," and "I learned how dangerous meth is. It is f-ed up," why Sheff seems allergic to contractions). But he expertly weaves statistics, interviews, and advice through this riveting account of one family's ride on the roller coaster of recovery and relapse. And despite Nic's apparent year of sobriety at the book's close, Sheff manages to avoid the kind of sappy, happy ending that parents of addicts crave as achingly as their kids crave the next fix.