Nonfiction Book Reviews

Well, if I ever had any thoughts of using drugs, they’re gone now. Tweak: Growing up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff has completely cured me of any desire to use any sort of drug, up to and including sleeping pills.

A lot of personal memoirs seem to follow the same basic structure: Poor me, look at my childhood, I had such a hard life.  The End.  It seems like there are so many autobiographies out there that don’t have anything more to offer than that. (Example.  And yeah, this one too.)

And perhaps it’s because I’ve been reading so many autobiographies, one right after another, but whatever the reason, that’s something that has started to get on my nerves.  After all, a tough childhood is something that I would say a fair majority of America has lived through.  Show me how you changed, and grew to be a better person, or something.

Well, Tweak broke all of the “autobiography rules” by:

A) Talking about what a great childhood he had - he really loved his dad and it shows.  There were some difficult things that happened, like his parents getting a nasty divorce and putting him in the middle of it, but overall, it was much better than say, Richard Pelzer’s childhood.  He also doesn’t dwell on the negatives all that much.

B) Nic Sheff has a lot to offer his readers, other than a long story of boo-hoo-is-me, by writing one of the most gritty and realistic views of drug use I think you’ll ever find in print.  If you’re worried about your teenagers using drugs, hand them this book.  If you want to use drugs after reading this book, there’s something really wrong going on.

In Tweak, Nic chronicles almost two years of his life, starting out with Day One, and proceeding from there.  Each day reads like a journal entry - he writes entirely in the present, and by the end, you feel as if you had in fact lived two years of his life.

And what a terrible two years it is.  Day One is found with him starting a bender, where he spends weeks getting high and doing some massive drugs.  He cleans up at one point, and spends over a year clean and sober, which was really good to see, after reading about so much crap.  But then he goes off the deep end again.  *sigh*

This book is rated a solid R, perhaps even something higher than that, because of several huge things:

1) Nic’s mouth (he uses swear words as adjectives regularly);

2) Massive drug use (obviously);

3) And a whole lot of sexual stuff.  Nic does things he’s not proud of, how about that?  I don’t think they’ll nominate him as Man of the Year anytime soon.

There were some really good passages, such as when Nic is talking to his friend/co-drug dealer, and saying that he wants to clean up and get off the drugs:

I tell him I’m thinking about getting clean again.  He tells me it’s a waste of time.
“What is life for, if not for living?”
“Is this living?”
“We’re so free.”
“Sort of.”

And at the beginning of the book, he did think like his drug dealing friend: Using drugs, to him, was freedom.  He didn’t want to listen to anyone else, he wanted to do what he wanted to do, and that was drugs.

Over the course of the book, he starts to realize that using drugs actually takes away your freedom, because you are constantly lying, stealing, and/or prostituting yourself for another hit.  You would sell your mother for a “fat bag” of crack (as he called it - I learned all sorts of drug slang in this book that I’d never heard before and didn’t particularly want to hear, but oh well).  By the end, he’s come to the realization that the only way to be truly free was to be drug free.

This book was raw, dark, and disturbing.  And yet it gave me a small measure of hope that someone who had been so horribly destroyed by drugs could eventually fight his way free of the addiction.

I give Tweak 3.75 out of 5 stars, and add a STRONG parental warning to the book.

Side note: Apparently, the father has written a memoir covering his son’s life, but from his point of view as the dad.  I don’t think I’ll read it, just because Tweak was so depressing/disturbing, but I did think that was interesting.

Hava

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