David Sheff recounts how he lost his son to meth and the long, agonizing struggle to get him back.
To listen to a podcast of the interview, click here.
To subscribe: Click here to add Conversations to iTunes or cut and paste the URL into your podcasting software:
David Sheff watched his oldest son, Nic, transform from a happy kid who loved surfing with his dad into a meth addict who stole money from his 8-year-old brother. Nic broke into his father’s house so often that, eventually, David installed a burglar alarm to keep his own son at bay.
David, a longtime San Francisco Bay Area journalist, struggled for years to help his son get off drugs and stay off them, all while enduring Nic’s lying, disappearances, betrayal and terrifying close calls. Nic was arrested for possession in front of his younger brother and sister. He overdosed and was revived in the emergency room. Most heartbreaking, Nic went through rehab, got clean, returned to school or work and then relapsed, only to end up strung out on the streets again.
Meanwhile, David miserably second-guessed his own role: Was his divorce from Nic’s mother (sparked by his infidelity) and their long-distance joint custody arrangement a factor? Or his own youthful history of drug use, which included snorting meth? Should he have forced Nic into rehab back when he was under 18, when his drug use had seemed more like typical adolescent experimentation? As the crisis stretched on for years, with the relative calm of Nic’s periods of recovery colored by the ever-present fear that he’d relapse again, David had to struggle to keep his own obsession with Nic’s addiction from dominating his life and the lives of his second wife and two younger children.
In 2005, David told their story in the New York Times Magazine in a piece called “My Addicted Son.” In reaction, David received hundreds of letters from readers, an outpouring of their own similar sad sagas. Now, David, 52, and Nic, 25, who has been sober for two years and three months, have written simultaneously published father-son addiction memoirs. Nic’s, called “Tweak,” is a book for young adults that does not spare sordid details, including how he turned to prostitution for drugs and almost lost his arm to an abscess caused by shooting up. David’s book, called “Beautiful Boy,” is a father’s agonized tale of watching his son deteriorate and get clean, alternating between the fear of losing his child and a stubborn hope that — maybe this time — Nic would finally stay sober.
Salon spoke with David Sheff at our offices in San Francisco.
How did you find out that Nic had a drug problem?
We were really close, and I thought it would mean that we always would be pretty open with each other. So I was completely shocked when he was in seventh grade, and I was looking for a sweater for him, and found pot in his backpack. He was just this little boy. I had no clue. But I met with his teacher, and I talked a lot to Nic about it. I thought it was just the product of being influenced by some “bad kids,” some of the darker, more precocious kids in school, who were not his normal friends.
The next time it happened was at the end of his freshman year in high school. I got a call from the school, and they found him buying pot. He was kicked out for a day and forced to go into an afternoon drug rehab program. We came in and met with the counselor and the dean, and then he seemed fine for a couple of years.
Things descended when he was a senior in high school. Now, I look back, and I see the times when he ran away, the times when he stole stuff from us and from other people, his erratic behavior, weird hours he kept, the people he was hanging out with. Anybody else in their right mind, a sane parent, would have looked at him and said: “You know, he’s having trouble with drugs.”
I kept explaining it away and thinking he was just rebelling a bit. Normal adolescent stuff. It wasn’t until he graduated from high school, and went to Berkeley, that everything just spiraled out of control. He started using methamphetamine. Then, it was no longer a question. He was disappearing for days at a time, and when I finally found him he looked like he was ready to die. It became clear he had a problem I could no longer ignore.
Back when he was in high school, didn’t counselors and psychologists affirm your view that he was going through a typical rebellion and that he would get through it?
When I brought him to therapists, and I brought him to counselors, the consistent message was that he’s going to be fine: Kids do this. He’s experimenting with drugs.
Nic said: “I’m not stupid. I’m not going to do anything stupid. Everybody I know smokes a little pot.” And even when things escalated to the point where I was concerned, and I did go see specialists, it was always minimized.
In hindsight, do you think that, given who Nic is, the only way for him to avoid addiction was to never try drugs at all?
Like Nic, if you’ve got the genetic piece, and the psychological piece, and other mental health issues, your predisposition is such that any use will probably lead to problematic use. Whether it will go as haywire and out of control and dangerous as it went for Nic, that is unknowable in any particular individual.
Nic was destined for this. He was just drawn to it, even intellectually. He loved the dark stuff. Reading Bukowski and Burroughs and Henry Miller doesn’t necessarily mean that a kid is going to try to emulate their debauchery to the point that Nic did, but he really was fascinated by it. For him, it was about being cool, it was about being an artist, it was about being on the edge.
Do you think that your experiences with drugs made it harder for you to recognize that Nic had a problem?
My experiences both made it harder to recognize that he had a problem and more scary for me. I used a lot of drugs, but I was not addicted. I was the guy in college who would be at a party getting wasted with all my friends at 2 o’clock in the morning, but I would say: “Oh, it’s 2 o’clock in the morning, I’ve got to get up for class in the morning. Goodnight.” And they would look at me like I was from Mars, especially my roommate who went on to be a heroin, meth and cocaine addict.
I know that you can do drugs, and they don’t necessarily destroy your life. Although I definitely did things that could have killed me, I was lucky. I do know that some kids do experiment with drugs, and they move on. I wanted to believe it [was true for Nic]. On the other hand, I had seen so many victims.
Once you started looking into rehab for Nic, you found there is a really high relapse rate for meth. Do you feel like that’s a problem with the programs, or is that a testament to how hard it is to get off the drug if you’re addicted to it, or both?
I think that it’s both, for sure. I thought, naive and hopeful, that I could send Nic to rehab, and I would pick him up in 30 days and he’d be cured. It would be over. What I now know is that addiction is a chronic and progressive illness that requires a trajectory of treatment, which sometimes can mean multiple rehabs.
A nurse told me that probably nine out of 10 kids who come in using meth will relapse. If you measure longer term, the relapse rate is lower. So the success rate is somewhere around 50 percent for people who are engaged in rehab over the course of years. And so it wasn’t as bleak as it sounded at the beginning.
I was getting calls from some people who were longtime sober, who said to me, “You just have to let him go. He has to hit bottom. He has to figure it out. He has to want to live more than anything.” But then I got a call from a mother who heard that we were going through this, and she said, “My son is now 30 years old, and he’s been sober for five years, but before that he was in and out of rehabs and treatment centers and hospitals and detoxes 10 times, and if I didn’t send him that 10th time, he would be dead now, and he will tell you the same thing. So all I can tell you is: Don’t give up on him, and do everything you can.”
When you were going through this, it seemed like you would get a lot of well-meaning advice that was 180 degrees contradictory. What advice helped you the most?
The advice was tricky, because if somebody told me what I wanted to hear, I would embrace it, because I was so scared. I was so afraid that he was going to die. If somebody told me to go find him, when he was on the San Francisco streets, I would get into my car and go do it.
Every impulse I had was to go try to find him. It’s sort of a scene from a bad movie. I would go out and scour the streets of San Francisco, and it was a ridiculous thing to do. The chances of finding him were pretty slim. And if you find somebody, and they’re high on drugs, and if they don’t want to go into treatment — Nic’s an adult, he’s over 18 — there’s not much you can do about it. To try to help somebody who doesn’t want to be helped is ludicrous. It doesn’t work.
I guess the best help that I got was when I finally was directed to Al-Anon meetings, and I was with people who had been through what we were going through, but who weren’t trying to tell me what to do. They were only telling me what they had been through, and all of a sudden I realized that I wasn’t so alone, and that was enormously comforting.
What is it about methamphetamine that makes it so addictive?
Researchers who study this have shown me pictures of what happens inside the nervous system. The methamphetamine molecules hook onto the receptors in the brain differently than any other drug. If somebody does cocaine, the body can break it down and diminish the impact over the course of about 45 minutes or an hour. Methamphetamine blocks the system that normally would do that. Methamphetamine stays active until the drug itself breaks down, about 12 or 14 hours. The physical impact is dramatic.
There is also an equally destructive emotional factor that kicks in because the drug causes this outrageous pouring out of dopamine and other neurotransmitters — all drugs do that, but the volume is just greater with meth — and depletes the body’s ability to regenerate them. The methamphetamine high is the greatest thing in the world because you’re using up all of those chemicals that make us able to feel good, feel happy, feel all of the positive emotions that we know. But then it’s gone.
When you come down from methamphetamine, the feeling is so bleak and so haunting. It’s depression, but it’s depression that I think is inconceivable for somebody who hasn’t done it. It’s just so dark that you then will do anything you can do to feel better. And the only thing you know how to do at that point is to get more meth, and so the cycle kicks in.
With methamphetamine the first weeks of withdrawal are characterized by depression and anxiety that are both off the charts. It’s emotional with a physical basis. In other words, someone is feeling so bad, and they can’t sit still, and the one thing on their mind is that they want more drugs.
The scans of meth addicts’ brains look normal again, but not until two years have passed. After two years the prognosis is better partly because of all the other things known about recovery and treatment, but partly also because the capacity [to recover] is back.
When Nic was going in and out of rehab, what did you feel like you were able to do to help? And what could you really just not do?
Well, it changed. I played the game with Nic. He would tell me that he was doing better. I would want to believe it so badly, I would say, “Oh, thank God. Sure, you can come home.” And then he would steal stuff from us again. He would say, “I’m just going to A.A. meetings, can I borrow the car?”
“Oh, sure Nic, as long as you’re in recovery, that’s really a good, wonderful thing. I’m so proud of you. Sure, take the car.” Until he would do that for three or four nights in a row, and then he wouldn’t come back, and it finally dawned on me that, well, maybe he wasn’t going to A.A. meetings, he was going to the Tenderloin in San Francisco or going to Oakland to his dealers’ and he was scoring and using drugs with his friends.
I learned the hard way that there was only one thing that I could help him do. It was to wait for him, basically, until he was willing to go into a treatment program. That was hard, because there were times when he would call me up, and I would be in anguish, and all I wanted to do was go get him, put him in my arms and take him home, but I would say, “Are you ready to go into a program somewhere? I’ll pick you up and bring you right to a program. I’ll find someplace.”
And he would say, “No. I don’t need that. I’ve done that before, it doesn’t work for me. I’m not going to go to one of those places. It’s all bullshit. They’re just going to shove A.A. at me, and I don’t believe in A.A.”
So I would say, “Well, Nic, I’m so sorry, but I love you and call me when you’re ready to get help.” And I would hang up the phone, and I would just weep, because that’s not what I wanted to do. Every impulse was to just say, “Anything you want. I’ll come get you. I just want to see that you’re safe.”
You wrote that you came to think of him as two people, and that helped you cope. How did you learn to think of him that way?
One of the times Nic relapsed, I thought he was sort of pulling it together on his own, and he called me up and he told me this elaborate lie, “Hi, Dad, I’m doing better now. I’m out in the desert with my girlfriend, and I’m sitting here under a tree writing.”
Only later I found out that he had made that call from Oakland, and he was on crack. Somehow that moment I was able to fathom what was happening to Nic, to me and to our family in a new way, which was that Nic on drugs was a completely different person than the Nic that I knew and loved and raised.
Now, I certainly am enormously hopeful. Nic seems great. He doesn’t have any false illusions about himself. But we both live with the specter of his addiction over us, and probably always will.
There is so much shame around addiction. Not only the addiction itself but all the associated behavior, like the squalor and the stealing. Were you reluctant to tell your family’s story so publicly?
I was reluctant. At first I didn’t tell anybody when this was going on, and it was because of the shame. It wasn’t so much that I was trying to protect myself, but I was trying to protect Nic. I didn’t want people to think badly of my son, my lovely, perfect, beautiful boy son. I just didn’t want people to think of Nic differently.
I read other stories of addicts and alcoholics, like Thomas Lynch’s “The Way We Are.” They always helped. I finally stopped worrying what people would think. I found out that almost everybody has some secret, some dark fear that if people knew this about them they wouldn’t like them anymore, or would look down on them.
What I learned is that really the opposite is true. The more I tried to keep this a secret, the more I was in turmoil. I’d try to show this exterior to the world that everything was fine with our happy family, our little kids, Nic’s off doing something, while inside I was dying.
I finally realized that I couldn’t keep it a secret any longer. At one point, it just sort of spilled out. I was less sick. It still didn’t solve the problem. But when I started to tell people about it, I would hear this outpouring of emotion and acceptance.
What was it like to read Nic’s story of his addiction? What most surprised you about the experiences he described?
The reality was so much worse than anything that I had ever imagined. It was so hard to read. Everything from the dangerous situations he got into because of the whole drug world, dealing with dealers and addicts and stealing money, robbing people, prostituting himself to try to get drugs and money.
I have this image of this child in my mind — this sweet, happy, little jumping-around kid — pouring into his veins just quantities of drugs. I can’t conceive of anybody doing as many drugs as Nic did.
Grief that doesn’t heal
A new memoir explores one father's experience coming to grips with his daughter's death
When Roger Rosenblatt’s 38-year-old daughter, Amy, a pediatrician, died unexpectedly of an undetected heart condition in 2007, he and his wife of nearly 50 years moved from their home in Quogue, on the southern shore of Long Island, down to their daughter’s house in Bethesda, Maryland, to help their son-in-law, a hand surgeon, take care of their three small grandchildren, then ages six, five and one. In his beautiful memoir “Making Toast,” Rosenblatt chronicled how pulling together to create a hectic, multigenerational household saved them all. Despite its heart-rending subject matter, “Making Toast” was ultimately a hopeful, heartwarming book.
“Kayak Morning,” which deals with the tenaciousness of grief, is a more melancholy read, less cathartic and reassuring. It is a bereaved father’s meditation on unacceptable loss. What it has going for it is searing honesty, exquisitely expressed. Discussing his earlier volume, Rosenblatt writes, “In it, I tried to suggest that the best one can do in a situation such as ours is to get on with it. I believe that still. What I failed to calculate is the pain that increases even as one gets on with it.” A therapist friend tells him, “Grief comes to you all at once, so you think it will be over all at once. But it is your guest for a lifetime.” The challenge, Rosenblatt comes to understand, is to transform grief into a positive force.
Always a loner, Rosenblatt takes up kayaking two and a half years after Amy’s death as an escape from his hectic household — which gathers in Quogue during the summer. Affording rare moments of solitude, his time on the water is brooding time away from the brood. “Kayak Morning” opens just past dawn on June 27, 2010, a few months after the publication of “Making Toast.” While the rest of his family — including his wife, two grown sons, and six grandchildren — sleep, Rosenblatt slides his olive-green kayak into the water and paddles out to Penniman’s Creek. Over the next seven hours (and 145 pages), he explores both his own life and that of the half-mile-long creek, letting his thoughts and boat meander, “bob[bing] along in solitary confinement” as the “tides rummage with the pebbles.”
Rosenblatt’s observations about his palindromic vessel, literature, and his own painful feelings are sometimes somber but always rich. He comments, “You can’t always make your way in the world by moving up. Or down, for that matter. Boats move laterally on water, which levels everything. It is one of the two great levelers.” Rosenblatt is practiced enough to know that his statement is far more powerful without spelling out the second leveler.
As Rosenblatt’s reflections make clear, it wasn’t as if he lived a life sheltered from painful realities before Amy’s death. The author of 15 books, including “Children of War,” Rosenblatt recollects grim assignments reporting on Cambodian girls in Thai refugee camps, patients in a Beirut mental hospital, and children of Hutus and surviving Tutsis staring out windows in a U.N. camp in Tanzania. He recalls the many U.S. presidents he has met, including an affable Ronald Reagan, about whom he wrote the “Man of the Year” story for Time magazine.
Amid his anger at God and disgust with his own weakness and self-absorption, his thoughts frequently turn to literature, including works about fathers and daughters (“King Lear,” “Emma,” “Washington Square”) and “crazy old men in boats: Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Hemingway’s Old Man, Captains Ahab, Nemo, McWhirr, Wolf Larsen, Queeg, Bligh.” Commenting that “Only literary jerks like me think of ‘Moby-Dick’ in Starbucks,” he adds, “Seeing the world through a book darkly. I’m not sure it’s good for you.”
In other words, all that intellectualizing and introspection may not be as effective a path to happiness as just doing what you have to do: “Too much is made of the value of plumbing the depths. The nice thing about kayaking is that you ride the surface, which is akin to dealing with the task at hand.” Still, for certain people — Rosenblatt among them — plumbing the depths is inescapable. And writing, which, like kayaking, requires “precision and restraint,” is what keeps him afloat, even if it is not as effective at making “sorrow endurable, evil intelligible, justice desirable, and love possible” as he would wish.
Drifting on the water, he realizes that “Art does not make up a life. Experience does not make up a life. And death does not make up a life either.” What does, then? Love. “Kayak Morning,” with this hopeful epiphany, leaves us looking forward to Rosenblatt’s next update on how he and his extended family are getting on with the business of making “somewhere out of nowhere,” triumphing over the devastations of abiding grief through enduring love.
The death of the celebrity memoir
We can thank Snooki for something: Finally, this annoying publishing trend looks like it is fizzling out
(Credit: sgame via Shutterstock)
In a recent essay for the Daily Beast, Michael Korda, the storied former editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, warned the public to stay away from celebrity memoirs, decrying the majority of these books as “dull, homogenized, bland and sanitized.” He ought to know, for as he goes on to explain, he spent much of his professional life trying to persuade movie stars to write their autobiographies. (One of the ironies here is that Korda, while a celebrity only in the book world — which means not much of a celebrity at all — is famous for writing divertingly about almost any topic, including himself. This piece is no exception.)
A growing awareness of this truth might explain why sales of celebrity memoirs have fallen off of late. According to the Guardian newspaper in Britain, a whole raft of celebrity-authored books tanked in the U.K. last year. In the U.S., as well, there have been several notable failures, particularly by cast members from the reality TV show “Jersey Shore.” Could the public finally be wising up?
Of course, the cause might just be the low caliber of the celebrities in question. I didn’t recognize any of the names the Guardian held up as fizzling memoirists — except for Alan Partridge, who isn’t even a real person. “I, Partridge” was in fact written by the actor-writer-director Steve Coogan, who created the character of Partridge for a television series parodying B-list chat-show hosts and other effluvia of the media world. His book is a parody of celebrity memoirs, and reportedly the only “significant” title in a genre whose sales have dropped 60 percent in the past year.
However, I suspect it’s mostly just wishful thinking that has some observers pegging the celebrity memoir as a fading trend. It’s hard for me to say for sure, though, because I seem to have a much lower than average interest in the people who write them. To be honest, apart from a couple of episodes of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” back when it first came out, I’ve never watched a reality TV show. (My feeling is that if I’m going to be entertained, I’ll go to professionals.) So I still don’t really know who Snooki is, and when I asked friends and acquaintances to fill me in around the time her book came out, they all said. “You’re lucky. You’re much better off not knowing.”
Most celebrities are actors of some kind, and my (somewhat limited) experience writing movie and television journalism has led me to conclude that actors are some of the least interesting people in the arts. That doesn’t mean I’m not regularly awestruck by the work they create; I just really don’t want to listen to them talk about it. Or about their personal lives. And I certainly don’t want to read about either one. The more famous and rich an actor is, the more controlled, frictionless and therefore insipid his or her life is likely to be. As Korda writes, “Years of standing in the limelight portraying other people for large amounts of money does not usually lead to a high degree of self-examination, let alone self-criticism.”
I’m not talking about creative visionaries like Patti Smith or innovators like Tina Fey, real writers whose ability to reflect thoughtfully on their own work and lives is unquestioned. Their books don’t exist for the sole reason that the people who wrote them are famous and know some other famous people; often, they aren’t even thought of as celebrity memoirs in the first place. The true celebrity memoir is “written” (that is, ghostwritten for) what used to be called “entertainment personalities,” namely, movie and television stars.
A movie star, like a politician, has usually spent much time, effort and money to construct a public persona, and, as Korda explains, such people are “seldom likely to want to deface their images, or to puncture the balloon of their egos merely to sell books.” (The money to be made on even a successful book is dwarfed by the fees for starring in Hollywood movies.) For this reason, most famous actors’ memoirs are bland and cautious, but even if they were willing to “tell the truth” — the thing, according to Korda, that every book publisher hopes for — that truth is unlikely to be worth the price of a hardcover book.
The example he uses is the film actor Glenn Ford, whose memoir the agent, Swifty Lazar (a more entertaining character than any actor Korda mentions), once tried to peddle. Ford had co-starred and been infatuated with Rita Hayworth (the Angelina Jolie of her time). But they’d never slept together, which put him in a fairly similar position to every other guy in America except Orson Welles. Who cares? And if Ford had slept with Hayworth? Is that really enough to justify the other 250 pages of a no-doubt tedious book chronicling Ford’s childhood in Canada and early theater work in Santa Monica? Sort of a moot point, that, since Ford clammed up at the very mention of the Hayworth non-affair.
Perhaps reality-TV stars have arisen to fill the candidness deficit created by people who are famous for some good reason. That movie star or top athlete is never going to ‘fess up about his or her private quarrels and most humiliating intimate or professional moments; they don’t have to. But reality-TV stars exist for the sole purpose of having embarrassing experiences in the public eye. They aren’t just willing to talk about this stuff: it’s their job. They’ve got nothing else to talk about.
Again, I’m the opposite of an expert in this department, but I do have a certain perspective to offer. Because I don’t watch reality TV, my impression of it is constructed entirely from conversations with people who do watch it. With the exception of a handful of contest shows like “Project Runway,” I’ve never heard anyone speak of the characters in reality TV shows without contempt. Often they will go on and on about how awful these people are. Whatever lofty anthropological reasons some of them may offer for watching the shows, from my perspective it seems that their chief appeal lies in giving viewers someone to look down on.
But while Americans may take great pleasure in collectively groaning over whatever risible antics Snooki gets up to for a half-hour every week, it’s no surprise that this would not translate into sales of her book. Surely people buy celebrity books not because they’re anticipating a satisfying literary experience, but rather to own a tangible piece of that individual’s stardom. (Also: Autograph tours are an obligatory element in the publication of any celebrity-authored title, so they get a chance to meet their idol face-to-face.) It’s another way of expressing one’s fandom. If the whole point of Snooki is hating on her, why would anyone want to purchase a bookful of that?
Celebrity memoirs make some commenters very, very angry. Although the genre has been around (in one version or another) for at least a century, the latest iteration is often held up as Exhibit A in arguments for the disgraceful state of book publishing. I can’t get too worked up about this. It makes as much sense as ranting about the abundance and popularity of books on any topics that don’t interest me personally (i.e., golf — lotta golf books out there).
Besides, the indignation seems misdirected. Publishers publish these titles because (until recently, at least), they do sell. For all the hopeful talk of declining enthusiasm for the genre, it’s worth noting that “Kardashian Konfidential” has sold well over 100,000 copies. Paris Hilton’s “Confessions of an Heiress,” published in 2004, has sold over 1 million worldwide.
Doesn’t the problem here lie instead with the buyers of such books? (Seriously: Since I have such a hard time imagining why anyone would do so, if you have bought one of these celebrity memoirs, would you be so generous as to explain your motives in the comments thread?) Every time someone told me I was fortunate in not knowing who Snooki or Kim Kardashian are, I couldn’t help wondering why they chose to know so much about her themselves. Perhaps they secretly enjoy their own theatrical disgust with the state of American culture and society.
If we really wanted these annoying figures to go away, the solution is pretty simple: Stop paying attention to them. I’m here to testify that this is very easy to do. You, too, can know next to nothing about the Situation or Tila Tequila (whoever they are!), if they really bother you that much. A blank expression will pass over your face when their names are mentioned in conversation, and when you see placards announcing their forthcoming appearances at chain bookstores, you’ll frown vaguely, shrug and keep walking toward the shelves with the real books.
Further reading
Michael Korda on the dullness of Hollywood memoirs
The Guardian on flagging sales of celebrity memoirs
The Hollywood Reporter on the failure of Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s “A Shore Thing.”
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller
Inside the “Boston Miracle”
The man behind Operation Ceasefire chronicles his decades-long project to reduce inner-city crime
In the mid-1990s, David M. Kennedy spearheaded Operation Ceasefire, a series of interventions aimed at bringing down the high youth homicide rate in Boston. The project worked so well that it became widely known by another name: the Boston Miracle. In his new book, Kennedy, now a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College, writes, “I always hated that name, it wasn’t a miracle, it was hard damned work.”
“Don’t Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America” is Kennedy’s passionate account of that work, which has seen striking results not just in the roughest sections of Boston but in many of the bleakest neighborhoods of the United States. While his goals were lofty — healing toxic relationships between the police and blighted communities, rewriting the conventional wisdom on gangs, drugs and violent crime — Kennedy proposed solutions so simple that cops often laughed him out of the room.
Years of research showed that a very small percentage of gang members was actually driving inner-city violence – and that most of the kids joining gangs felt trapped and scared. The program Kennedy created in response involved calling them into forums with police and a host of community workers and social service providers. Gang members were told that the community cared about them and would help them, but the violence had to stop. If it didn’t, they were warned, heavy law enforcement would come down on them hard. The program left gangs intact but “surgically [excised] the violence from the mix.” In most cases, violent crime plummeted almost immediately.
Kennedy’s chronicle of his two and a half decades working on urban crime is highly readable, if occasionally repetitive. He is by turns hopeful and wry, though consistently generous to the many colleagues he’s worked with in the field. He is also bracingly honest, about everything from poisoned race relations and vicious local politics to the zigzagging emotions he experiences as he immerses himself in this important work. He writes, “I have gone from feeling, at least from time to time, pretty damned smart, to feeling deeply, profoundly humble and not infrequently ashamed.”
A journalist’s take on his absentee dad
Newsweek's first black editor explores his relationship with his father in a new memoir
Mark Whitaker, the first black editor of Newsweek and current managing editor of CNN Worldwide, explains that it was the memoir of another prominent biracial man, “Dreams of My Father” by Barack Obama, that inspired him to write his own father’s story in “My Long Trip Home.” He goes on to clarify that his memoir will be very different because, unlike President Obama, he knew his father “for half a century, for better or, as was so often the case, for worse.”
The comparison between the two men is apt. Like Obama’s, Whitaker’s heritage is complicated and fascinating. His mother was born to white French-Protestant missionaries who sent her, at age fourteen, and her five younger sisters to live in the United States when the Nazis invaded France. Whitaker’s father, C. S. Whitaker, or Syl (as he preferred), grew up in Pennsylvania, the son of black parents who ran a successful funeral parlor business. The two met at Swarthmore, where his mother taught French and his father was a student. After getting to know each other, they realized they shared a Quaker faith. And yet, despite their ability to overcome massive roadblocks as an interracial couple, the marriage failed after six years, and Mark and his brother Paul were estranged from their father as he moved away and grew increasingly troubled.
Though the absentee father is unfortunately a familiar theme for memoirists, Whitaker’s approach to his story is unusual. As a journalist, he has been trained to remain unbiased — and though he has the right to editorialize on his father’s actions, Whitaker never chooses sides. While he recalls his mother being distraught over his father’s refusal to pay child support, his feelings about his father’s behavior manifest in other ways — he turns to food for comfort and then battles anorexia as a teenager. He stops drinking for fear of succumbing to alcoholism, as his father did. In preparation for his own marriage, he asks his father why his parents divorced. When his father responds that his mother refused to wear lingerie, and “after that … it was over,” Whitaker expresses disgust but offers a very evenhanded interpretation of the scene: “I was startled at how intent he was on blaming my mother, but I was also flattered that he was being so candid with me. And I felt relieved.”
The second half of the memoir shifts abruptly from personal stories to Whitaker’s professional life at Newsweek and his subsequent rise to the top of the magazine. His experience handling the major news stories of the last twenty years (including a funny anecdote about Henry Kissinger pulling over in Manhattan for soft-serve ice cream) gives the reader an insider’s perspective on the New York news world. That said, the transition from personal to professional is jarring, and one feels that the time could have been spent on other questions. For instance, it’s disappointing that Whitaker’s mother remains a shadowy figure throughout the book. She is, after all, the person who raised him. Intriguingly, “My Long Trip Home” shares this with President Obama’s book as well — in seeking closure with their fathers, the authors neglect their mothers.
Ultimately, Whitaker emphasizes the importance of forgiveness, but not before venting his resentment towards his father: “It wasn’t just love for my wife and children that made me so driven to be a good husband and father. It was also an elaborate form of revenge. I was getting back at him by proving that I could succeed in all the ways he had failed, and that I could do it without his help.” He eventually reneges on this anger, remembering what his mother’s uncle warned her before her marriage: “Angry men don’t make good husbands.” Indeed they don’t — but Whitaker’s ability to move forward shows that anger can be transformed into sheer determination and, ultimately, success and understanding.
Joan Didion’s most beautiful book yet
Her new memoir is harsh, self-questioning exploration of her life before and after her daughter's death
In 2003′s “Where I Was From,” Joan Didion tells of a long wagon journey on which her great-great-grandmother buried a child, gave birth to another, contracted mountain fever twice, and sewed a quilt, “a blinding and pointless compaction of stitches,” that she must have finished en route, “somewhere in the wilderness of her own grief and illness, and just kept on stitching.” Throughout the book, Didion ruminates on her female forebears, women “pragmatic and in their deepest instincts clinically radical, given to breaking clean with everyone and everything they knew,” even their own dead babies.
It was Didion’s adopted daughter, Quintana, at age 5 or 6, who first made all this heredity start to seem remote. And if the author harbored any lingering doubt about whether she shared her ancestors’ breaking-clean tendencies, the shattering effect of Quintana’s death in 2005, at age 39, must have swept it away. In her new memoir, “Blue Nights,” about life before and after the loss of her daughter, Didion writes, “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.”
This book may be Didion’s harshest, most self-questioning book yet; it’s definitely her most beautiful. Like the stitches on her grandmother’s quilt, it covers the same material again and again, swooping down on its author’s grief with dogged, needle-like precision, from countless angles that don’t lead her anywhere soothing. “What if I fail to love this baby?” Didion worried as she carried the newborn Quintana home from the hospital. By the time of “Blue Nights,” the questions have changed. What if I didn’t love her right, the author interrogates herself. What if I didn’t love her enough? How could Didion “have missed what was so clearly there to be seen” — “the startling depths and shallows of her expressions, the quicksilver changes of mood,” the list of “Mom’s sayings” that Quintana posted on the garage wall: “Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working“? “Was I the problem?” she wonders. “Was I always the problem?”
Didion dwelt in “Where I Was From” on her female forebears’ tendencies “toward slight and major derangements” and “apparently eccentric pronouncements,” traits she’d once seen as biologically endemic. “Blue Nights,” by contrast, fixates on nurture, on the terrible possibility that a mother’s neuroses might be contagious. At the age of 5, Quintana called a state psychiatric facility to “find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy.” Around the same time, she called Twentieth Century Fox “to find out what she needed to do to be a star.” She dreamed of a “Broken Man” who threatened to lock her in the garage, and she wrote a novel “just to show you” that told “why and how Quintana [not just the name of its author but also its protagonist] died and her friends became complete burnouts at the age of eighteen.” Once she was born, Didion admits, “I was never not afraid.” And she all but blames herself for Quintana’s nightmares. “[M]y fear of The Broken Man [was] as unquestioning as her own,” she says.
Throughout these struggles, Quintana’s psychiatric diagnosis remained frustratingly protean. Manic depression became OCD; OCD became something else, something Didion can’t remember now, but something that ultimately gave way to a succession of other conditions before “the least programmatic of her doctors settled on one that actually seemed to apply”: borderline personality disorder, a diagnosis that didn’t lead to a cure, only “a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility.” Depressed and anxious, Quintana drank too much. She wished for death as she lay on her sitting room floor: “Let me just be in the ground, she had kept sobbing. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.” She implored Didion not to read Auden’s “Funeral Blues” at her father’s funeral. “Like when someone dies,” she once told her mother, “don’t dwell on it.”
Even as she torments herself with memories of Quintana’s troubles, Didion recognizes that child-rearing standards change. While parents measure their success now by “the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us,” her own World War Two-era childhood emphasized independence over schooling and friends. She roamed the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, eavesdropped on the patients, and put them into stories. “There was a war in progress,” she recalls. “That war did not revolve around or in any way hinge upon the wishes of children. In return for tolerating these … truths, children were allowed to invent their own lives. The notion that they could be left to their own devices — were in fact best left so — went unquestioned.”
In the title essay of her 1979 book “The White Album,” Didion recalls a psychiatric evaluation of her own, conducted in 1968 (two years after she and her late husband, John Gregory Dunne, brought Quintana home from the hospital), that said her Rorschach responses “emphasize[d] her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal.” Rather than admitting to or denying these claims, or trying to trace the source of her (mild) breakdown, Didion jokes that “an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”
In “Blue Nights” Didion brings a compelling and paradoxical blend of skepticism, acceptance, and astringent detachment to bear on these trends in psychology — and how they both reflect and shape our own self-images. As in most of her personal writing, she’s highly attuned to these kinds of recursive absurdities, and I would guess she’s also more than a little bit amused by them. But, like the very funny Flannery O’Connor, she depicts the ridiculous with a poker-face. And, as in O’Connor, the comic element of human existence is always the obverse of something much darker.
Didion acknowledges in interviews that it was a fluke — a flu — that killed Quintana, not mental illness, not alcoholism, not anything she herself did. But as she sees her own health fail, as she tries to “maintain faith (another word for momentum),” follow the doctor’s instructions, and “collect encouraging news,” as she spends whole days in frigid waiting rooms pondering “this one question, this question with no possible answer: who do I want notified in case of emergency?,” she sustains herself by “memoriz[ing] her child’s face.” Didion’s implicit subject has always been the storyteller’s conundrum: that in standing far apart enough from life to digest it and to evoke it, the writer forgets how to live in real life. For Didion, to remember Quintana is to tell stories in which she’s not a good enough mother to Quintana, but to stop telling these stories is to run the risk that Quintana “will fade from my touch. Vanish. Pass into nothingness.” We tell ourselves stories in order to live, she once wrote. If Quintana were to disappear, Didion implies, she herself would stop existing.
Page 1 of 33 in Memoirs
Komen’s Nancy Brinker Should Explain or Step Down 
Why Do Writers Need Readers? Not for the Reason You Might T 
Mother Blame, and the Special Needs Child 
Whose Wisconsin recall is it? 
Can Greece thwart a complete meltdown? 
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s alternative abortion history 
Inside Syria’s whirlwind of war 
Syria’s looming threat of civil war 
Santorum’s well-compensated love of fracking 
The Tea Party’s war on mass transit 
At the CPAC-Occupy beer summit 
Whitney Houston’s lessons in love 
Our non-withdrawal from Afghanistan 
