DAVID SHEFF
AUTHOR OF BEAUTIFUL BOY: A FATHER’S JOURNEY THROUGH HIS SON’S ADDICTION
Renowned journalist David Sheff is the author of Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey through His Son’s Addiction, the story of his harrowing struggle to help his son Nic overcome his methamphetamine addiction. There have been many books about addiction, but few from the father’s and family’s point of view until Beautiful Boy which brings immediacy to the emotional rollercoaster of loving a child who seems beyond your help.
The book is based on Sheff’s article “My Addicted Son,” which appeared in the New York Times Magazine. It won a special award for Outstanding Contribution to Advancing the Understanding of Addictions from the American Psychological Association and inspired (and continues to inspire) hundreds of letters from readers, many of whom are suffering from addiction or the addiction of a loved one. His continues to research and writing about this subject and most recently contributed to the HBO book Addiction: Why Can’t They Just Stop.
Along with The New York Times Magazine, Sheff, a contributing editor to Playboy, has also written for The New York Times, Wired, Fortune, Rolling Stone, Outside, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Esquire and Observer Magazine in England, Foreign Literature in Russia, and Playboy (Shueisha) in Japan. He has conducted seminal interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, nuclear physicist Ted Taylor, Congressman Barney Frank, Steve Jobs, Ansel Adams, Thomas Friedman, the founders of Google, Tom Hanks, Betty Friedan, Keith Haring, Jack Nicholson, Carl Sagan, Larry Ellison, Salman Rushdie, and others. He also wrote an award-winning documentary about John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and a radio special about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, both for National Public Radio, and wrote and edited Heart Play: Unfinished Dialogue, which won a Grammy Award nomination for Best Spoken Word Recording of 1984.
Sheff is the author of Game Over, called “the bible of the videogame industry,” by The Wall Street Journal that also earned great praised from Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Forbes, USA Today, The New York Review of Books. He is also the author of the book China Dawn about the Internet revolution in China that has been described in the Wall Street Journal as “the story of an insurgency, and a momentous one.” All We Are Saying, based on Sheff’s interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1980, was a Literary Guild Selection book. The Times called it, ''A fascinating, detailed glimpse into the workings of a musical genius” and People said it was “the most revealing portrait of John Lennon’s career.”
Sheff has been an editor of New West and California magazines and was a founding editor of Men’s Life and Yahoo Internet Life.
TOPICS:
- Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction
NICHOLAS SHEFF
AUTHOR
Nicholas Sheff was drunk for the first time at age eleven. In the years that followed, he would smoke pot regularly, do cocaine and ecstasy, and develop addictions to methamphetamines 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. Now in his early 20s, Sheff is a recovering drug addict and alcoholic who has written a memoir, Tweak, about his experience. He has also been published in Newsweek, Nerve, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
In a voice that is raw and honest, he spares no detail in telling the compelling, heartbreaking, and true story of his relapse and the road to recovery. He plunges into the mental and physical depths of drug addiction, painting a picture 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.
In an extraordinary turn of events his father, David Sheff, has also simultaneously written a New York Times best-selling memoir about their experience, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey through His Son's Meth Addiction.
TOPICS:
- Tweak: A Harrowing, But Hopeful Portrait of Addiction
- An Evening of Addiction, Hope, & Redemption with Nicholas & David Sheff
