Tweak
Growing Up on Methamphetamines
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Publisher Description
The story that inspired the major motion picture Beautiful Boy featuring Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet.
This New York Times bestselling memoir of a young man’s addiction to methamphetamine tells a raw, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful tale of the road from relapse to recovery.
Nic Sheff was drunk for the first time at age eleven. In the years that followed, he would regularly smoke pot, do cocaine and Ecstasy, and develop addictions to crystal meth and heroin. Even so, he felt like he would always be able to quit and put his life together whenever he needed to. It took a violent relapse one summer in California to convince him otherwise. In a voice that is raw and honest, Nic spares no detail in telling us the compelling, heartbreaking, and true story of his relapse and the road to recovery. As we watch Nic plunge into the mental and physical depths of drug addiction, he paints a picture for us of a person at odds with his past, with his family, with his substances, and with himself. It's a harrowing portrait—but not one without hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A memoir written in the present tense, Sheff's first book graphically if self-indulgently recounts his addictions to various drugs, including meth and heroin, and his attempts at recovery as he reaches his early 20s. His narrative begins as he relapses, not for the first time, after 18 months of sobriety, taking readers down an exhausting spiral that includes a na ve attempt at dealing drugs; burglarizing his father's house; hooking up with a vulnerable ex-girlfriend and calling 911 after she overdoses; sleeping and shooting up in his car; and going back into detox. The cycle then repeats, in all its minute details. Flashbacks recall a privileged San Francisco childhood riven by divorce, youthful promise and subsequent degradation (prostitution, stealing from his young half-siblings). Nic's absorption in himself, often expressed as self-contempt, makes much of his account read like a therapeutic exercise, especially given its repetitious nature. While it's tempting to ask if Nic's journalist father's version of the same events, in Beautiful Boy (Nonfiction Reviews, Apr. 30, 2007), supplies the insights missing here, this book's unmediated, down-and-headed-for-disaster sensibility may, for some teen readers, produce the same transfixing quality as a highway accident. Ages 15-up.
