(Two new books chronicling addiction by a father and son on my list … -Blue Ruin)
Nic’s book, “Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines,” is a first-person account of his drug addiction, which
began while he was still in high school (where he learned to shoot up from studying a diagram on the Internet) and lasted for more than a decade. …
David’s book, “Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction,” is the same story seen through the father’s eyes. He describes how a seemingly gilded youth (Nic was an honor student and co-captain of the high school water polo team) went almost overnight from casual marijuana use — just a phase, one of his teachers said — to full-blown addiction. In the beginning, David writes, he was in denial, then he was hurt and angry, and ultimately, in his worry and preoccupation and efforts to understand what happened, he became, in effect, addicted to his son’s addiction, unable to stop torturing himself. What had he done wrong?
… Nic, who had been clean for 18 months, relapsed. He writes about the setback, which involved resuming a destructive romantic relationship, in such a way that the reader can feel it coming almost before the author does.
The experience and his subsequent effort to straighten himself out yet again accounts, Nic said, for the change in his book’s tone in the second half. “I started feeling and making connections,” he said. “Before, I was tending to invent myself as a kind of fictional character and not really owning the things that were happening to me.”
Tweak exerpt: http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=22&pid=536194&agid=2
