TweakGrowing Up on Methamphetamines

A son's journey through the harrowing world of meth addiction.
In the opening of his diary-style memoir, Nic Sheff has left a recovery house and stands on a San Francisco street plotting exactly how he will relapse. Since early adolescence, Sheff has traded the privileges of his upper-middle-class, culturally elite world for alcohol, pot, heroin, cocaine, prescription drugs — but most especially crystal meth. In Tweak, Sheff lays bare his hideously destructive behavior with the non-reflective, automatic impulses of a true addict. While he leaves most of the psychodynamic analysis to his father, David Sheff, whose twin memoir Beautiful Boy tells the story from a father’s perspective, he does explain how stealing from the mini-bar on a family vacation led to blackout drinking and blunt smoking in high school, which in turn led to his discovery of the drug that would savagely take over his life.

For all his matter-of-fact, Bukowski-esque accounts of rambling binges, he captures the craven need of his daily life as a user with all the cautionary horror of Go Ask Alice: prostitution, overdoses, thievery, a pathetically desperate scene picking microscopic crack rocks out of the backseat of a car. Though recovery ultimately rescues him from the dangerous throes of street life, giving his memoir a cautiously happy ending, it is clear in his rueful admissions that the five-year high has wrought significant, irreparable damage to his young life.