David Sheff

Sheff was born in Boston, Massachusetts and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley before beginning a long career in journalism. He has written for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Wired, Fortune, and NPR’s All Things Considered. His son Nic was born in July 1982; he and his wife Vicki divorced in 1985, and Sheff remarried in 1989 to Karen Barbour. He and Karen had a son, Jasper, in December 1993, and a daughter, Daisy, in June 1996. On February 6, 2005, Sheff published a story called “My Addicted Son” in The New York Times Magazine about Nic’s drug addiction, and the positive response to the article prompted Sheff to write Beautiful Boy. He has since written several other books about his and Nic’s personal journeys with Nic’s addiction. Sheff currently lives in San Francisco, California.