David Sheff's Beautiful Boy

I received an email more than a year ago from a father who had read an article about me that appeared in a national magazine.  He wrote that his oldest son had struggled with substance abuse for many years and described briefly the damage and emotional price he and his family had paid and continued to.  He thanked me for sharing my story about losing my David and asked if I would do him the honor of allowing him to send a copy of his book that he had written about his own family's journey.  I agreed, told him how much I appreciated his kind words and spent the next couple of months waiting for the book to arrive. 

It never did and I eventually forgot the email exchange until 6 weeks ago.  A package arrived in the mail from the publisher Houghton Mifflin, and when I tore it open the book entitled "Beautiful Boy" slid out into my hands.  A small card fell from the pages that read "With the compliments of the Author" and I suddenly remembered the email exchange so many months before with David Sheff.

As I drew out the book Beautiful Boy my heart was rife with emotions. Feelings of joy, gratitude, dread and envy swarmed around me as I thumbed through the pages. Joy that he had finished his opus.  Gratitude that he had remembered me from so many months before.  Dread because I knew that each page would hold for me …remembrance…delight…grief…laughter…pain…solace… and anguish.   And finally there was envy...envy that he still had his son and could write about his continuing recovery while my own writings are about loss, grief and unfulfilled dreams.

Beautiful Boy is a beautiful, honest, heart wrenching yet engrossing memoir of one family's odyssey through the uncharted and tempest tossed passage that is the disease of addiction.  It chronicles the path that millions of families trod every day which often begins seemingly innocently with the first discovery of an empty liquor bottle or a bag of pot.  It is inevitably followed by denial of the problem by parent and adolescent alike that seems to grows as the evidence of abuse mounts.  Anger comes next when we can no longer escape the fact that addiction has a hold of our young person.  Bargaining and despair often ensues when we recognize that we are powerless over our child's addiction and that it has made our lives and theirs unmanageable.  And finally, if  we are fortunate through the help of treatment professionals,12 step programs and others who have been this way before we reach acceptance that the disease of addiction is indeed cunning, baffling, powerful, patient, and that in the end we didn't cause it, we can't control it and we can't cure it.

For me the most affirming aspect of David Sheff's tender narrative is the way that it ends with the acknowledgment that his son Nic's struggle with addiction is a day to day proposition and that it will always be that way.  David's journey to the level of awareness that Recovery is lifelong hard work for all of us who are addicts, as well as those who love us, is at times painful and agonizing.  Yet therein lies the very essence of Beautiful Boy's message that through this odyssey called addiction there can be understanding and that with understanding there can be a rekindling of hope.  Hope that had not been lost to us but clouded by despair, denial, anger and pain.

Beautiful Boy may seem to many to be just about the collateral damage  and havoc of addiction but for those of us who have walked this path with David and Nic we know that in the end there will always be love and that hope does indeed spring eternal.