Tweak+-+O'Meara


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Ginee Seo Books, 2008

=He Said, He Said= Review by POLLY MORRICE Published: February 24, 2008

Addiction is repetitious. The fact that alcoholics and drug abusers often tread the path of use, rehab, sobriety and relapse presents a challenge to authors of addiction memoirs, who must squeeze this dispiritingly cyclical behavior into a straight-ahead narrative or risk telling the same story over and over. “Beautiful Boy” is an addiction memoir once removed, depicting the collateral damage that a drug-abusing child inflicts, yet it underscores how the heartbreaking circle game of addiction can fetter a writer’s sense of what to include and, more important, when to stop.

“Beautiful Boy” grew out of an article that Sheff, an author and journalist, published in The New York Times Magazine in February 2005. Stringently unsentimental, the article was bookended by two events: Sheff’s realization that 19-year-old Nic, returning home from a second try at college with skin “rice-papery and gaunt,” has started using crystal meth again, and Nic’s eventual re-emergence into sustained sobriety. The story drew a huge response, especially from parents of addicted children, and it resulted in book contracts for both David and Nic, an aspiring writer.

“Beautiful Boy” grew out of an article that Sheff, an author and journalist, published in The New York Times Magazine in February 2005. Stringently unsentimental, the article was bookended by two events: Sheff’s realization that 19-year-old Nic, returning home from a second try at college with skin “rice-papery and gaunt,” has started using crystal meth again, and Nic’s eventual re-emergence into sustained sobriety. The story drew a huge response, especially from parents of addicted children, and it resulted in book contracts for both David and Nic, an aspiring writer.

Unfortunately, Sheff’s hopeful ending, which quotes Nic’s graceful apology to his half brother for the earlier, drug-fueled theft of the younger boy’s savings, proved premature. Within months, even as Sheff was recovering from a life-threatening brain hemorrhage, Nic and his girlfriend embarked on a binge of shooting meth and speedballs (the cocaine-and-heroin concoction that killed John Belushi). Soon they were hawking their clothes for food. Nic’s dramatic fall and Sheff’s health emergency are recounted in the last section of “Beautiful Boy,” but they seem to color the entire memoir. Crisis by crisis, the book maps Sheff’s emotions, which veer from agonized self-examination to increasingly harsh judgment of a culture that makes addiction possible.

Little in Nic’s early life in a Berkeley bungalow suggests future abuse of a drug that many still link with low-income users in rural areas. Sheff and his wife, members of “the first generation of self-conscious parents,” are utterly absorbed in raising their child. The marriage fails, however, undone by Sheff’s affair with a family friend, and at the age of 5 Nic becomes a frequent flyer, shuttling between his father in San Francisco, where he goes to school, and his mother in Los Angeles, the site of his summers and holidays. Looking back, Sheff laments that joint custody cost Nic a sense of security. And he regrets his own youthful drug use — pot, cocaine, mushrooms, Quaaludes, “random uppers and downers” and, just once, crystal meth — which he sees as typical of the early ’70s but also as a flaw he has somehow passed on to Nic. Indeed, his son’s troubles push Sheff toward somewhat straitlaced views. He can no longer relish movies that treat bibulous characters lightly: “Sideways” strikes him as “the story of a wretched alcoholic.” And, in contrast to Nic’s experience as a sidekick to his bachelor father, the two children of Sheff’s second marriage are raised conventionally, with sports practices, pets and weekly dinners with their grandparents.

Still, much of Nic’s young life has a golden California tinge. When Sheff remarries, he and his wife move to west Marin County, where Nick becomes a keen surfer. Later, he gains admission to a selective private high school. His drug use begins as experimentation: in middle school, caught with pot in his backpack, he protests, “Everybody smokes.” He is sent to therapists, but the lapses mount. When Nic returns from a summer study program in Paris, he looks “grayer” and has an ulcer; back home, he is arrested for marijuana possession. After dropping out of college, he samples meth, and “the most malefic drug of them all” quickly becomes his drug of choice. Although Nic completes a short drug rehab program, he spends just three days in the follow-up halfway house before fleeing to the streets. It is the start of years of rehab and relapse, of thefts and lies, centered on a drug that, Sheff learns, causes not just physical attrition (users may “cough up chunks of the lining of their lungs”) but brain damage. Meth depletes reserves of dopamine, a neurotransmitter thought to contribute to feelings of pleasure and excitement; the nerve endings that release it become essentially “singed.” Withdrawal is worsened by depression, pain and fogged reasoning, and the meth-altered brain requires two years of abstinence to repair itself. As “Beautiful Boy” ends, Nic is once again sober and inching toward this two-year goal. Clearly, Sheff is relieved at this development, but his conclusion emphasizes his own progress. Thanks to intensive therapy and the shock of being severely ill, he has at last let go of his “obsessive” worry and guilt feelings and mostly accepted the Al-Anon mantra — you didn’t cause it, you can’t control it and you can’t cure it. Hopeful signs, to be sure, but even readers going through journeys like Sheff’s, who have picked up the book for guidance or solace or out of solidarity, may feel that the author, for whom writing the book served as an adjunct form of therapy, might have cut its length without shortchanging its message.

Nic Sheff says he and his father “weren’t involved in each other’s books,” and differences in their accounts of the same events suggest this is true. However, both “Beautiful Boy” and Nic’s memoir, “Tweak,” which is being released as a young-adult book, share an affinity for catharsis. In “Tweak,” Nic’s venting ranges from tripled expletives to an evocation of his addiction as “seven flames of doubt, fear, sorrow, pain, waste, hopelessness, despair.” While his father’s decision to lay open much of his life stems from a desire to help other families of addicts, Nic’s urge to tell all seems to derive in part from the lessons and language of rehab — his goal is to be “authentic.” But Nic also admires chroniclers of wild descents — Rimbaud, Charles Bukowski — and the 25-year-old writer’s infatuation with them shows.

“Tweak” is written as a journal that covers nearly two years in Nic’s early 20s. It includes day-by-day accounts of two relapses, zoned-out intervals in which Nic forages — alone, with girlfriends, with a pathetic partner named Gack — for drugs or the cash to buy drugs. In flashbacks, Nic recalls earlier binges in which he turned tricks to survive. In the course of “Tweak,” he suffers a needle-induced infection so severe that a doctor suggests he will lose his arm, convulses repeatedly following cocaine “hits,” and has a psychotic breakdown during which he perches in the rafters of his mother’s garage, imagining himself a spider. At this point, Nic is forced to return to rehab. For readers who can stick with it, “Tweak” should work as an effective anti-drug tract. Nothing here, not even the frank accounts of meth-triggered marathon sex, makes substance abuse seem remotely attractive.

Readers of these books may find themselves weighing their opinion of Nic. Seen through his father’s eyes, he is a beautiful boy: funny, talented and kind, if suffering from a disease with genetic roots. As revealed by “Tweak” — admittedly, the work of a young man — Nic seems hard put to imagine any viewpoint but his own. This may be a useful trait, if not for writing then for staying sober: as an expert quoted by David Sheff explains, focusing on what an addiction is doing to you, rather than to others, is the only way to escape it.

New York Time

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