Beautiful Boy

I don’t know about you, but much of what I learned in college and graduate school classrooms has faded away over the years. Sad, especially given how long it took me to pay off those student loans. On rare occasions, though, something floats back. It happened while I was reading Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction by David Sheff. Although Sheff’s memoir of his son’s addiction to methamphetamine is painfully honest and poignant, it becomes an irritating read at times. Why? Well, Sheff fails to avoid what lit-crit types call the “imitative fallacy.” Basically, it’s a fancy way of saying that it’s best not to write a dull story to prove that your character has a dull life.

Sheff’s story is compelling: his charming and intelligent son turns into a virtual stranger, an unpredictable drug addict who lies, steals, and breaks into his own parents’ home. Unfortunately, the natural course of the disease is a seemingly endless cycle of recovery and relapse that can exhaust the patience of even the most loving family. Similarly, Sheff’s carefully crafted prose keeps looping back over the same territory one time too often as Sheff facilitates his son’s recovery then agonizes over the inevitable setbacks. Real life, unfortunately, doesn’t shape itself into a neat narrative arc, but the best memoirists find ways to make the patterns of their lives resonate more deeply each time the writer and reader revisit them. I think of Joan Didion’s brilliant memoir The Year of Magical Thinking with its haunting refrain “life changes in an instant.”

Near the end of the book, Sheff makes the difficult but painful choice to let go of trying to control his son. He enters therapy and begins to live his own life more fully, breaking the heartbreaking cycles of recovery and despair that are so excruciating to read.