Rating  - A startlingly powerful memoir
Written with a first-person on-the-scene journalistic style that allows its author/protagonist an eerie degree of detachment, Nic Sheff's TWEAK is the dark counterpoint to BEAUTIFUL BOY, written by his father, David Sheff. The elder writer's grief-filled memoir glows dimly like a distant planet of despair, while the son's account of the same events burns like an angry Mars.
Nic Sheff was an attractive, almost androgynous young man of great brilliance who felt empty and false inside until he began using methamphetamine. Then he became alive and whole. "It was like, I don't know, like everything else faded out." He changed from a youthful contender for the prizes of life --- a promising career as a writer, a hint of leadership, a quiet kindness that everyone noticed when he was a child --- to a street scavenger with no future at all.
At many junctures in Nic's tale, the reader wonders how he stays alive another day and what motivates him to get up and keep his body barely functioning long enough to torture himself once again by injecting meth, heroin, crack, or whatever he could get into his collapsing veins. He comes close to losing one arm to a horrific infection that smelled of death. He nurses a girlfriend through an overdose, saving her life by having the good sense to dial 911 --- but he doesn't draw any parallels between what happened to her and what could have happened to him. He loses every good job he ever has. He steals from his father, mother, stepmother and all their friends. He even robs his kid brother. He prostitutes himself, hanging out on the brutal margins of the gay bar scene, enduring any degradation for the magical few minutes that a high affords him.
Nic drifts downward, only occasionally straightening out under the vigilance of a treatment program. The book opens when he has just completed 18 sober months, and has a job and money in the bank. He runs into an old friend named Lauren and together they plunge headlong downhill, in a very short time using up every penny he has saved to feed their habit. He even gets "work" as a drug dealer, seeing it as a pretty easy gig. He winds up having a meal in a mission church he had volunteered at in grade school. "I know I felt sorry for them --- men and women wrapped in blankets on the hard concrete...I never in my life imagined being one of them."
After Lauren comes Zelda, rumored to be the real-life Lala Zappa, niece of the rock innovator Frank Zappa. It emerges in later therapy that Nic gravitates towards famous people and that Zelda reminded him of his mother. Zelda (called "Z" in his father's book) is just the sort of self-destructive, sexually insatiable, untrammeled addict who could help Nic in his non-existent career as a writer, and drag him into a pit of madness, danger and death. That she both loved and controlled him is evidenced by the many vignettes of their shared daily doom. When, skeletal and starving, he passes out while helping her move furniture into a van so the two of them could have a yard sale of her memorabilia to feed their addictions, "I wake up to Zelda shooting me up with some coke." They sleep through the day of the yard sale.
The exhausting cycle of rob, score, get high, rob, score, get high is finally broken when Nic gets caught breaking into his mother's place. His father gives him a choice: treatment or jail. He chooses treatment, and this time it works. Nic does not moralize or suggest that he has now chosen a better way of life. His simple statement, "Using just has no place in my life now and I can't see that ever changing," does not go very far, though it may strike a chord for its honesty. Maybe someone who has been as far down and as lost as Nic can't say more.
Nic and David are close these days. They were always meant to be, but Nic's addiction took away a lot of years they could have shared. Nic is working on living quietly and becoming authentic and true to himself, while David is getting back to work as a writer. They have been involved in some publicity tours that allow them to highlight the drug problem in America. They're both more steady and clear. Maybe it's the relief of knowing that tomorrow will be a decent day, and the tomorrow after that.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
Rating  - It had potential but poorly written
For someone that repeatedly proclaims his writing expertise I was very disappointed with this book. It is a rambling, self-centered pity party. I read "Beautiful Boy" and thought that it was an excellent book that successfully portrayed the horrible struggle that parents have when their children start using drugs - the out of control aspect, the helplessness, the grief - this book really showed them all.
I thought that having a second book written by the son telling his side of the tale was an interesting idea, and I bought it because I was very curious to hear what Nic had to say about the same events. Compare how the father was seeing the downfall while Nic was actually experiencing it.
"Tweak", however, falls flat. I didn't come away with it with any better understanding of why a child of privilege would throw everything away on meth. There were no insights. I didn't even think it was very interesting, and I certainly didn't think it was well written.
Honestly, I think if there had been an editor for this book that actually made the writer refine his work it would have been a better story. Everything about the book just seemed so even handed. There were no ups or downs, no rush or climax, it was all just the same monotone voice. As it is I think there are much better books out there that deal with personal addiction. Nic didn't reach me. He didn't make me care. If anything I came away with the feeling that he was spoiled and selfish, not sympathetic towards his addiction at all or with any new understanding about addiction. Nothing new here.
Let me save you $10. Nic does drugs because he likes them. He complains about his parents divorce and how he was abandoned. He complains about his father and that he was raised more like an adult and didn't have a childhood. Then he praises his father for his parenting skills and his wonderful childhood. He can't find God. He thinks he found God. No, he can't find God. He sobers up. He relapses. He sobers up. He relapses. He is diagnosed Bipolar. Things make sense. He stops taking his meds and relapses. He has sex a lot. He hustles. He steals. He shoots up. He falls down. He shoots up some more. Complains about parents. Praises parents. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I'll keep "Beautiful Boy" but "Tweak" goes in the Salvation Army giveaway pile.
Rating  - Eye opening and frightening
I ordered this book along with the father's when I saw them on Oprah. I have shared them with my son who is only 21 and has been in prison for almost 2 yrs because of drug addiction. Because of these books he has opened up and we can honestly talk about how to set goals to stay clean once he is released. Just like the book sometimes you find out things that you can never imagine your precious child has gone through to get that high.
Rating  - What a selfish author
OK, I read it (groan). He painted some lovely characters but didn't resolve them, I was left thinking it was all about him, and I gather meth recovery is selfish(from his book).
I only wish he would go back to college, study modern history and sociology, and really learn how to write. I feel a bit ripped off for buying and reading the book, I was not enlightened at all, nor did I warm to him. I am lying awake still thinking it was a huge name dropping exercise ... "Mum and Dad were journalists, I was so talented, I went to Europe, I was so smart I got into the best colleges blah blah blah and then I screwed myself up". There was no backdrop to any of it, he doesn't even seem to realise that people his age going off to war because they haven't had the opportunities he had and know no better ... when he does feel out of touch with the world he needs to hook up with movie reviews... WHAT!? I am bored with his empty sexual prowess. Then he wept on the beach in Hawaii... (admitted to having a prozac moment). There is a much bigger world than his introspective journey. I sound bitter, but I found the book really narrow and stunted.
Rating - Honest and Hopeful
This book was so honest and left me with hope. I thought he was a strong writer and I can not wait for his next work.
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Customer Reviews for Ginee Seo Books,1416913629,9781416913627,1416913629,362.299092 |
