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Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines (Thorndike Press Large Print Literacy Bridge Series) | 
 enlarge | Author: Nic Sheff
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Category: Book
Buy New: $23.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  83 reviews
Sales Rank: 283137
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Lrg
Reading Level: Young Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 475
ISBN: 1410409422
Dewey Decimal Number: 616.8640092
EAN: 9781410409423
ASIN: 1410409422
Publication Date: September 3, 2008 (In 13 Days)
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Not yet published
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| Customer Reviews: Read 78 more reviews...
 great book August 13, 2008
This is one of a kind book. It is the kind where you really cannot read too long , but you cannot stay away from reading too long either.
It shows you the scary reality of our young generation who can easily get hooked to bad lifestyle and refuses to know how or when to get out of it. It is an amazing book
terrific August 2, 2008
this book was honest and heartbreaking. A true account into all the complications of addiction.
Great inside view into the life of addiction! August 1, 2008
I don't know of anybody that has battled with addiction so I got this book to help my understand. I heard about it on a local radio station when the author stopped in for a visit. This book really gives you an ides of what a person might do to feel their additions...It's unbelieveable but the author survived it all! Great read!
3.5 Stars July 31, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I should preface this by saying my sister is a recovering Meth and Heroin Addict. The stark contrast between what is available for treatment when you have parents with money and insurance is astounding but not surprising. I would have killed to have the resources to get my sister into the types of treatment that Nic had access to. In the end, it may or may not have made any difference because addiction is one of the few personal journeys that one takes with everyone they love in the front seat powerless to alter the direction.
Dealing with my sister's addiction and our addiction to her I truly believe that people will treat you as badly as you allow them and they will get away with what they can. I wonder if Nic always felt like he had a safety net knowing his parents had the insurance and financial means to afford his rehab once he had reached a bottom he was not comfortable with. Not saying this to minimize the complete and utter despondency that is synonymous with addiction but perhaps a different perspective when it comes to addiction and socioeconomic status.
Tweak begins at a fast and engaging pace for about the first 100 or so pages. During the first of Nic's description of his sobriety the book begins to lag and become repetitive and I start to wish there was a "Name-Dropper Anonymous" that Nic could attend and breathed a sigh of relief when his treatment facility suggested he spend the time not focusing on who he knows. During some points of the book he describes his situation with brutal honesty and at other points he glosses over situations that would have added an extra layer of depth and understanding to the book.
The lowest part of Nic's addiction appears to be at a point before his books started. I felt like to truly understand how low he had reached in his addiction it was important to read more about this period in his life as it affected him so greatly in the book and was only mentioned in an almost passing way. We read about the aftermath of his time as a prostitute but again the details of this time period were glossed over again lessening the impact of the book.
I was surprised to see who Nic decided to dedicate his book to. Perhaps, I am jaded after reading "Beautiful Boy" and dealing with the utter despair that a family member feels when an addict in the family is knocking on death's door with an uncontrolled and desperate vigor and you tying to do anything to slow their nose dive into hell and realizing there is nothing you can do but watch. The choice of dedication also left me with the feeling that we were missing more pieces of the puzzle to Nic's story.
I would absolutely recommend this book and his father's "Beautiful Boy" to anyone dealing with an addict in the family even with the books imperfections it is an insightful read and gives a sometimes powerful glimpse into the mind of addiction but also leaves a lot of unanswered holes and questions about Nic's life as an addict.
A startlingly powerful memoir July 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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
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