The world tells us that everyone is made for something, that you have to find your calling or that you have to discover your path. We always ask ourselves and try to make out what we are made of. Sometimes we find it, sometimes we don’t. Somethings make us question if we really do have a calling. Sometimes our life takes a turn which probably no one could have expected, not even ourselves. These turns are probably not so difficult to process for us, because we start experiencing them way earlier than anyone else around us does. It affects us badly, it does but what about those around us? What happens to them? There are many guides that you can get if you are such a second-degree affected person. Many people tell you ways to cope with it and many tell you how to cure them who are originally affected. The book I am going to tell you about, though, is a little different.
Beautiful Boy is a book by David Sheff, published by Houghton Mifflin in February 2008. It is, at least to me, was a revelation of a book. It is about drug addiction, a subject so widely known yet one which we know so little about. Everyone knows drug addiction is bad. It is bad for our bodies and brains and to the people around us. You may think that this is just another for the shelf. In comes the whole title of the book: Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction.
David Sheff is a journalist from California, who writes for The New York Times. He describes in this book the journey of his son Nick’s addiction to methamphetamine or meth, as is so widely known. This journey is also accompanied(if I may say so) by his own journey, how he coped with it and how he did not. In such traumatic and deeply shaking stories, the focus generally tends to be on the main man, who in this case in Nick. The change only is the point of view. Point of view is an interesting thing because no one kind of it can tell you everything that there is to know. Something always remains unwritten, unseen, unheard and frankly the best shot we have at the complete truth is from the point of view of the author is the author. What David has done in this book is also very simple. He has just told. He starts from the start of his son’s life, his early years and traces the moments towards the start of his drug use. It could also have been put into a timeline, but being a journalist his words make it feel soothing. You can almost feel the waves of the Pacific as he describes his surfing journeys. As the journey goes through several big roller coaster style ups and downs, what you can call is a straight-line graph is David’s ability to cope with the situation and his visible trauma.
When you are the father if a son who goes down such a path in life, you are bound to be shaken, down to the core even. You don’t need to be a father to understand that. The first logical mental state that you go through is thinking that it is just a phase, that your son is strong enough to get over it, that he is capable of changing himself. What you first get when your son tries to come out of it is a false sense of security, you begin to trust them again. What if he relapses? What if he falls into the trap again? What then?
It may be expected that I now tell you that the book answered these questions of mine. Actually, it helped me raise these questions too. They told me that what I am thinking of is what actually happens. This is why the book is also very important. It was released at a time when there were not many sources of information that parents such as David could get, not much literature that they could relate to. This book, as David tells, helped a lot of people and gave them a relatable text that they could use to validate themselves. This book was an important read for me because it made me understand how severe situations can get and that too for people who probably do look, walk and talk like me.
There are some very visual, vivid and some even downright bad incidents in the book, although true. Things that you never even could’ve imagined. When you try to think of the journey a person would have had to go through to understand how someone so close to them could do some things so bad, it baffles you David’s mental journey in this book shows character, it shows love and it shows addiction. Addictions of two very different types. He does tell a different reason why he chose to write the book, but one cannot doubt that it took him immense courage to do so. The fact that he was a journalist might have helped a little. There are many small victories along the way, some that can and some that cannot be celebrated. There are many, many moments that turn your world on you, upside down.
The book is not one you should dive in expecting a happy ending, but one can say it is a very satisfying one. The book is beautifully written, it is disturbing and for all purposes a must-read.
Authored by - Miheer Karandikar
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