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

She calls me from the lounge. Nic has boarded the plane and it’s backing up from the jetway. I see her standing there with her cell phone to her ear, looking out the window. I see Nic on the plane. I see him as he is—frail, opaque, ill—my beloved son, my beautiful boy. “Everything,” I say to him. “Everything.” Fortunately there is a beautiful boy.

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

On a drug-fueled whim, Charles and I decided one night to drive to California to see the sunrise, and so, after packing up an arsenal of drugs, we barreled west to San Diego. It was still dark when we arrived at the beach. Sitting on the sand, blankets over our shoulders, staring out to the horizon, we awaited the sunrise. We smoked joints and talk

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

Drugs shield children from dealing with reality and mastering developmental tasks crucial to their future. The skills they lacked that left them vulnerable to drug abuse in the first place are the very ones that are stunted by drugs. They will have difficulty establishing a clear sense of identity, mastering intellectual skills, and learning self-c

“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

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

Anne Lamott advises, “Try not to compare your insides with other people’s outsides.” That is, it may look as if everyone else is doing great, their kids are sailing through. But no one sails through.

I can’t control it, and I can’t cure it, and yet I continue to think there must be something I can do. “One moment a spark of hope gleams, the next a sea of despair rages; and always the pain, the pain, always the anguish, the same thing on and on,” wrote Tolstoy.