When journalist David Sheff sent his son Nic off to college in 2002, he already knew that his firstborn had substance-abuse issues, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. Months earlier, Nic had been arrested for missing a court date on a marijuana possession charge. Nic’s next drug of choice—crystal meth—posed greater dangers. But David chose to believe the therapist who predicted that college would straighten Nic out. Instead, Nic dropped out within months. His father found him in a garbage-strewn alleyway. He blamed himself for being optimistic for too long. “At what point,” he writes in a new memoir, is one’s child “no longer going through a phase?”
Sheff’s Beautiful Boy is noteworthy in part because Starbucks started selling it in its 6,500 retail outlets in the U.S. this week, said Craig Harris in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The book is sure to be a hit. But Nic has simultaneously published his own memoir, Tweak, said Cassandra Jardine in the London Daily Telegraph. The two books offer readers a chance to marvel at how closely the pair’s outlooks now mirror each other. Nic, who has been clean more than two years, credits his father with insisting on rehab repeatedly, even after three programs failed. David just wishes he had intervened sooner. “The worry is that you encourage rebellion by overreacting,” he says. “But I now think it’s better than underreacting.”
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