In Beautiful Boy, author David Sheff recounts the true story of his son Nic’s battle with meth addiction. Despite David’s attempts to intervene, Nic becomes addicted to drugs as a teenager and becomes imperiled by that addiction as he undergoes a cycle of recovery and relapse in his early twenties. Throughout these years, Nic engages in increasingly dangerous behaviors that harm himself and also devastate his family. Through the book, David paints a harrowing portrait of addiction and its horrific consequences on his family, illustrating how it is an incurable, lifelong disease. Yet even in the face of his addiction, Nic works to try to recover and redeem himself. David thus emphasizes the importance of maintaining a cautious optimism, as the disease of addiction is a treatable one. Even when it appears that addicts are beyond hope, David demonstrates that, like Nic, they can still put themselves on a path to redemption and recovery from that struggle.
David presents Nic as a bright and creative child growing up—an image that contrasts with Nic’s addiction as a young adult—in order to highlight the life-altering harm that drugs have on Nic. In a report card, a teacher writes about Nic’s “burgeoning sense of kindness and generosity” and concludes, “I wonder at the gifts he will undoubtedly bring to the world.” Teachers and friends describe Nic as a leader who is intelligent and talented in the arts, showing how much promise he had. But Nic’s accomplishments start to evaporate the more he becomes involved with drugs: in ninth grade, he is suspended and almost expelled from his private high school for buying marijuana on campus. When he travels to Paris for a three-week program between his junior and senior year in high school, he gets drunk every day, to the point that he gives himself an ulcer. When he returns for his senior year, he cuts classes and quits the swimming and water polo teams and the newspaper. Just before Nic turns 18, he is arrested after being cited for marijuana possession. All of these issues serve as warning signs for the damage to come, and yet Nic’s addiction makes him unable to stop his decline. Over the course of the next several years, Nic is accepted at and drops out of the University of California at Berkeley. As he tries more dangerous drugs like meth, he disappears for days or weeks at a time and is hospitalized on several occasions. He also commits crimes in order to score more drugs and almost ends up in jail. When Nic is 23 and recovering once more, he tells David that after years of drug use, he feels that his life has been “stolen.” Nic’s perspective reflects how much ruin his addiction has brought upon himself.
Nic’s addiction also threatens the wellbeing of his family, proving how addiction can devastate not only those who are addicted, but those around them. The destructive nature of Nic’s addiction becomes apparent to David when Nic commits crimes against his own family. At various points, he steals hypodermic needles from his girlfriend, Julia’s, mother; tries to cash forged checks of David’s, breaks into his stepmother, Karen’s, parents’ house; breaks into his mother, Vicki’s, house; and breaks into David’s house multiple times to steal money. He even robs his eight-year-old brother Jasper of his $8 of savings. These acts depict Nic’s level of destitution and desperation, even at the cost of his family’s trust. Apart from these tangible violations, Nic also places an enormous emotional burden on his family. David in particular becomes sick with worry, constantly anxious about where Nic might be and whether he has relapsed again. This dynamic creates tension with Karen, who grows increasingly frustrated at David’s obsession with Nic’s addiction. David’s worry over his son also contributes to a brain hemorrhage that David experiences when Nic is 23, after Nic has had several relapses and near-death experiences. Nic’s addiction thus also makes “casualties of the family,” as David puts it.
Yet even though Nic continually tips himself toward disaster, each time he falters, he eventually recognizes the need to go to rehab and try to recover from the disease. Thus, David emphasizes that even though it is difficult to live with a disease like addiction, it is worth holding onto hope that an addict can be rehabilitated. After each one of Nic’s relapses, he reaches a point when he realizes how dire his situation is. He goes to several rehabilitation programs of various lengths, in which he tries to learn about the disease and to get treatment. His attempts, David illustrates, are borne of the idea that he can still hope to recover from his addiction and make better choices in the future. As David recounts, even rehab sometimes fails: Nic relapses after each of these programs. David thus argues that addiction is not something that is cured—rather, it’s a disease with which a person must live for their entire life. Still, he emphasizes that seeking recovery, even knowing it could fail, is important. A counselor at Nic’s college tells David that “relapse is part of recovery.” Even though this may seem counterintuitive, David learns that it’s better to think of relapse as a step to improving rather than as a failure, because it motivates addicts to continue seeking help. Through his continual pursual of treatment, Nic comes to see how just how seriously his addiction has harmed himself and his loved ones, which sets him on a path to try and progress the next time. Though addicts often have a long road ahead of them—Nic even relapsed after the publication of David’s book in 2008—there is still a chance that they can recover, as Nic has been clean since 2011. Thus, even when an addict appears to have ruined various aspects of their life, David uses Nic’s story to show that there is always hope for redemption.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Addiction, Ruin, and Redemption ThemeTracker
Addiction, Ruin, and Redemption Quotes in Beautiful Boy
People are relieved to learn that they are not alone in their suffering, that they are part of something larger, in this case, a societal plague—an epidemic of children, an epidemic of families. For whatever reason, a stranger’s story seemed to give them permission to tell theirs. They felt that I would understand, and I did.
Other comments from his teachers are effusive praise of his creativity, sense of humor, compassion, participation, and stellar work.
I keep a box in which I store his artwork and writings, like his response to an assignment in which he has been asked if you should always try your best. “I don’t think you should always try your best all the time,” he writes, “because, let’s say a drug atick asks you for drugs you should not try your best to find him some drugs.”
Drug stories are sinister. Like some war stories, they focus on adventure and escape. In the tradition of a long line of famous and infamous carousers and their chroniclers, even hangovers and near-death experiences and visits to the emergency room can be made to seem glamorous. But often the storytellers omit the slow degeneration, psychic trauma, and, finally, the casualties.
He’s in denial. It’s typical of addicts, who maintain and believe that everything is all right, they can stop when they want, everyone else has a problem but not them, they are fine, even if they wind up losing everything, even if they are on the streets, even if they wind up in jail or in the hospital.
He says that one of the most difficult things about having a child addicted to drugs is that we cannot control it. We cannot save Nic. “You can support his recovery but you can’t do it for him,” he says. “We try to save them. Parents try. It’s what parents do.”
He tells us Al-Anon’s Three Cs: “You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, you can’t cure it.”
It’s a tricky illness. Yes, people do have choices about what to do about it. It’s the same with an illness like diabetes. A diabetic can choose to monitor his insulin levels and take his medication; an addict can choose to treat his disease through recovery. In both cases, if they don’t treat their illnesses, they worsen and the person can die.
“I felt the same way about my son until I realized that he couldn’t get to school or work or a therapy appointment but he could get to pawn shops, get to his dealers, get whatever drug he wanted, get alcohol, break into houses, get needles—whatever was required. […] I felt so sorry for him, thinking, He’s depressed. He’s fragile. He’s incapable. Of course I should pay his bill if he winds up in the hospital. Of course I should pay his rent or he’ll be on the streets. So for about a year I paid for a comfortable place for him to get high.”
I shock myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things once unthinkable. […] He’s just experimenting. Going through a stage. It’s only marijuana. He gets high only on weekends. At least he’s not using hard drugs. At least it’s not heroin. He would never resort to needles. At least he’s alive. I have also learned (the hard way because, as it turns out, there’s no other way to learn such lessons) that parents are more flexible with our hopes and dreams for our children than we ever imagined.
Jasper responds, “I don’t think he wants to do them, but he can’t help it. It’s like in cartoons when some character has a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. The devil whispers into Nicky’s ear and sometimes it gets too loud so he has to listen to him. The angel is there, too,” Jasper continues, “but he talks softer and Nic can’t hear him.”
I guess what I can offer you is this: As you’re growing up, whenever you need me—to talk or just whatever—I’ll be able to be there for you now. That is something that I could never promise you before. I will be here for you. I will live, and build a life, and be someone that you can depend on. I hope that means more than this stupid note and these eight dollar bills.
I have learned that I am all but irrelevant to Nic’s survival. It took my near death, however, to comprehend that his fate—and Jasper’s and Daisy’s—is separate from mine. I can try to protect my children, to help and guide them, and I can love them, but I cannot save them. Nic, Jasper, and Daisy will live, and someday they will die, with or without me.
In recovery working with Randy, Nic was the one who explained the insidiousness to me: “A using addict cannot trust his own brain—it lies, says, ‘You can have one drink, a joint, a single line, just one.’” It tells him, “I have moved beyond my sponsor.” It says, “I don’t require the obsessive and vigilant recovery program I needed when I was emerging from the relapse.” […] And so Nic said he couldn’t trust his own brain and needed to rely on Randy, meetings, the program, and prayer—yes, prayer—to go forward.
Addicts’ families walk an unhappy path that is strewn with many pitfalls and false starts. Mistakes are inevitable. Pain is inevitable. But so are growth and wisdom and serenity if families approach addiction with an open mind, a willingness to learn, and the acceptance that recovery like addiction itself, is a long and complex process. Families should never give up hope for recovery—for recovery can and does happen every day. Nor should they stop living their own lives while they wait for that miracle of recovery to occur.
Parents of addicts learn to temper our hope even as we never completely lose hope. However, we are terrified of optimism, fearful that it will be punished. It is safer to shut down. But I am open again, and as a consequence I feel the pain and joy of the past and worry about and hope for the future. I know what it is I feel. Everything.
Can we cure addiction? Again, despite thirty-five years of aggressive research, many cases of cancer resist treatment. But we have made dramatic progress. And in the process we’ve relieved incalculable suffering, saved hundreds of millions of dollars, and saved millions of lives. A war on addiction would do the same—and more. By dramatically decreasing emergency room visits and prison populations, we’d eventually free up funds to treat other illnesses, improving health care across the board. We’d eliminate much homelessness and dramatically reduce violence, including child abuse, spousal abuse, and violent crime. We’d help families stay together and repair broken neighborhoods. We’d alleviate immeasurable suffering.
