Beautiful Boy by David Shelf

Beautiful Boy by David Sheff 1. Sheff intrigued me with his story just by the back of the book. The entire story is about his eldest son, Nic, who is an amazing student as a child; however, his childhood begins to fade when he gets into the life of drugs and alcohol. The experiences and hardships that the author goes through is very emotional which really kept me reading. 2. The setting affects the author and his story. The book takes place in modern day times as in 2008.

This impacts the author and his experiences because this is the time where drugs became more known and they were easy to get which made it harder for Nic, David Sheff’s son, to stop the drug abuse. 3. The themes in this book are patience and faith. David must be patient towards the recovery of his son’s drug addiction. He knows that this process cannot happen over-night no matter how hard he wishes it could be that easy. He waits patiently for Nic to get better. Nic, however, goes through rough patches while on this journey to succession, but his father always has faith in him.

I think that David and Nic’s experiences were incredibly traumatic. Sheff felt the pain that his son went through while being an addict and felt the need to share it with others. Another reason Sheff might have wanted to share this experience is because he wanted to show the difficulty and how bad it is to take drugs. 4. “When Nic was growing up, I thought I would be content with whatever choices he made in his life… Now I live with the knowledge that, never mind the most modest definition of a normal or healthy life, my son may not make it to twenty-one”(195-196).

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This proves the understanding that David has over his son’s life and that even though he believed at one point that Nic’s decisions will be made by himself, Nic has not made all the right decisions. This proved to David that his son needs guidance through out his whole life because once you are a father you are always a father. I chose this passage because this to me is David Sheff’s entire understanding of his son and this memoir. It shows that he understands what it means to be a father and what his role is 5.

If I could meet the author I would feel a little nervous. I would feel uncomfortable asking him any questions because I wouldn’t know how he would react: would he get emotional? Would he get annoyed? Would he act fine because he gets questions all the time. A hypothetical meeting with David Sheff is if he came to my school to talk about drug and alcohol addiction and how it impacted his life and others around him. A question I might ask is when did you realize that your son was not a casual user, but was an addict?

What was your immediate reaction? I would talk about the impact on his family, siblings and friends. I would ask about whom his friends were and if they were older because of the drug use. I would ask how he had the money for the drugs. A story of my own that I would share with the author is about a kid that I know that ended up not being able to go to college. All of a sudden he began going to rehab and no one knew why. As time went on people began to realize that he did drugs and drank a lot.

He became banned form school grounds for a certain amount of time. He was supposed to go off to college, but ended up not because he got in trouble with the law and had separation anxiety. His younger sister had to deal with the fights at home and her brother that she loved very much. I would share this story with Sheff to show that even though this story is not about my family or me, my family was one of the people impacted by this child’s actions.

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