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

“Addicts may have many complaints, including major and minor grievances from years past. Some of their accusations may, in fact, have truth in them. Families may well have caused pain for the addicts. They may well have failed the addicts in some significant way. (After all, what human relationship is perfect?) But addicts bring up these problems n

“What is turned on here is exactly what turns on while people feel pain.” The operative word is while. She goes on, “A person stops using methamphetamine, and this is awaiting them.” Clinicians who work with meth addicts already know that addicts are often depressed, argumentative, anxious, and unwilling to engage in treatment—exactly like Nic—but

HA JIN WRITES: “Some great men and women are fortified and redeemed through their suffering, and they even seek sadness instead of happiness, just as van Gogh asserted, ‘Sorrow is better than joy,’ and Balzac declared, ‘Suffering is one’s teacher.’ But these dicta are suitable only for extraordinary souls, for the select few. For ordinary people li

In the afternoon, Nic calls. He tells me everything—he has relapsed, is using meth and heroin. I have rehearsed my response. I shakily tell him that there’s nothing I can do. It’s up to him. I say that the police are searching for him, that his mother reported him missing to the Santa Monica police, and that the Marin sheriffs are patrolling our ho

After one lunchtime meeting, at which I briefly speak—I shakily begin, “My son is in rehab again”—a woman approaches and timidly hands me a pamphlet called “3 Views of Al-Anon.” “It helps me,” she says. At home, I read it. From “Letter from an Addict” in the pamphlet: “Don’t accept my promises. I’ll promise anything to get off the hook. But the nat

Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying.

“For all their tears and heartache and desperately good intentions, most families of addicts are defeated in the end,” writes Beverly Conyers. “Addicts persist in their self-destructive, addictive behavior until something within themselves—something quite apart from anyone else’s efforts—changes so radically that the desire for the high is dulled a

O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest

At my worst, I even resented Nic because an addict, at least when high, has a momentary respite from his suffering. There is no similar relief for parents or children or husbands or wives or others who love them.

The mirth evaporates when an extremely shy woman, who mentions her “practice,” so maybe she is a doctor or a lawyer, reveals in a fractured voice that she tried to kill herself a few days ago. She has pale, almost green, skin, no makeup, bristly hair, and eyes haunted by sleeplessness. She says that she drove to the Golden Gate Bridge and parked. S