David Sheff, “Beautiful Boy” Author In Everett Friday

David Sheff, author of “Beautiful Boy” a book about a father’s struggles to find ways to help his drug addicted son will be at the Performing Arts Center in downtown Everett Friday night. Here’s a bit about Sheff from the Everett Library, sponsors of his appearance…

Sheff’s many articles and interviews have appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Wired, Fortune, and elsewhere. His piece for the New York Times Magazine, “My Addicted Son,” won an award from the American Psychological Association for “Outstanding Contribution to Advancing the Understanding of Addiction” and was the basis for Beautiful Boy.

Sheff has also interviewed Ansel Adams, nuclear physicist Ted Taylor, Gore Vidal, Steve Jobs, Tom Hanks, Scott Peck, Betty Friedan, and Keith Haring, receiving wide recognition. His radio documentaries for National Public Radio on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird won several awards. When it first appeared in 1981, Sheff’s “The Playboy Interviews With John Lennon and Yoko Ono,” which has been described as “historic,” “compelling and compassionate” and “definitive,” was a Literary Guild selection.

Summary of Beautiful Boy from the library catalog:

What had happened to my beautiful boy? To our family? What did I do wrong? Those are the wrenching questions that haunted every moment of David Sheff’s journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery. Before Nic Sheff became addicted to crystal meth, he was a charming boy, joyous and funny, a varsity athlete and honor student adored by his two younger siblings. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who lied, stole, and lived on the streets. David Sheff traces the first subtle warning signs: the denial, the 3 A.M. phone calls (is it Nic? the police? the hospital?), the rehabs. His preoccupation with Nic became an addiction in itself, and the obsessive worry and stress took a tremendous toll. But as a journalist, he instinctively researched every avenue of treatment that might save his son and refused to give up on Nic.

Beautiful Boy is a fiercely candid memoir that brings immediacy to the emotional rollercoaster of loving a child who seems beyond help.

The event is free and will start at 7:00 PM in the Everett Performing Arts Center on Wetmore this Friday night. It is part of the library’s Beyond the Streets series.