Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction is a best-selling memoir by David Sheff that describes how his family dealt with his son Nic's methamphetamine addiction. It was published by Houghton Mifflin on April 26, 2008. The book grew out of the article "My Addicted Son" that Sheff had written for The New York Times Magazine in 2005. Son Nic Sheff's perspective was told in his own memoir Tweak, published concurrently by an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

Beautiful Boy covers a substantial portion of Nic's life and deals with the elder Sheff's struggles of how to respond to a son who he loves but who is also a danger to his family. Nic steals money from his younger siblings and gets arrested for possession in front of them, and Sheff is forced to install a security system to prevent Nic from breaking in. Nic attends many rehabs throughout the memoir, and even with those he relapses many times. The longest stretch of sobriety Nic had, prior to his last relapse in the memoir, was almost two years. He then relapsed once again and went into treatment. By the end of the memoir Sheff tells us that Nic has been sober one year. He hopes with all his heart that this will be the last time, and believes in him once again. But in his mind he knows that a relapse can easily happen again and that it will be very difficult for Nic, his family, and himself. Another theme throughout the memoir is Sheff wondering about how much he is to blame and what he could have done to prevent his son's addiction.

Throughout the memoir Sheff attends numerous Al-Anon Meetings and therapy sessions. In these different sessions he is continually told of the three Cs, you didn't cause it, you can't control it, and you can't cure it. Sheff has a difficult time accepting these statements throughout the memoir. At the end however, he says that he has come to accept two of the Cs, that he can't control it, and he can't cure it. He realizes that he has done everything he can do to try to help Nic, and knows that it's up to Nic to figure things out. He realizes that the only way Nic will fully recover is if he figures things out himself.

Beautiful Boy became a critical and commercial success. It reached #1 on the New York Times Best Seller List on April 6, 2008, and again on May 4, 2008. Entertainment Weekly named it the #1 Best Nonfiction Book of 2008 and it won the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for nonfiction in 2008. Amazon.com selected it as one of the "Best Books of 2008" and Starbucks picked it as one of the few books it would sell in its coffee shops.