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

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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 and 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.