Tweak

Finishing Tweak left me with mixed emotions. If you're planning on reading the book and want to be surprised, don't read the rest of this post. It contains "spoilers".

As with any memoir, the reader becomes very close to the narrator. We go through hell and back with this boy, get to know him inside and out - at points I felt so attached to Nic Sheff that I was biting my nails, on the edge of my seat, wanting to scream "Don't open that door! Don't go in there!" the way the socially unconcerned do during horror movies. If you're an active reader like myself (and I mean active; I could probably replace my cardio with memoir reading), you pour a little bit of your heart into these heroes, somehow hoping that your attention and prayers will change what has already been printed in the dwinding few pages remaining in the novel. But the truth is, the future has already been written. It has already been published. All you can do is turn the pages.

I find myself torn between wanting reality and wanting a happy ending. At the end of Tweak, Nic is only in his early twenties. He's in probably his fourth or fifth stint in rehab, and probably reaching the end of what his frail and abused body can handle. He is working his way through a treatment center that seems to have reached him in a way that none of the others have. And so page 319 closes with the promise of a clean adult life. Relapse is so far out of my mind that it hardly seems a threat...until I turn to the epilogue. Here we find Nic chain smoking and sucking down coffee like its the juice of the gods. True, he's still not using - but what happened to the clean, bright and shiny Nic we left in Phoenix? Where is the newfound belief in family, sobriety, and self esteem? He seems to have taken steps backwards. And yet I finish the epilogue still with an ember of hope for this boy to live normally.

And then I turn to the afterword.

First of all, give the reader a break. A prefacing note to readers, three different sections including 60 some chapters, and an epilogue - you can be finished now. We are being dragged through broken glass here, and could use a break. And yet, in the afterword, all of our (I use "our" because it truly feels as though I have been through this process, as well.. I should start a support group for Tweak readers) work seems futile. Nic has relapsed. He has crawled back out from that dark hole and begun his quest toward sobriety again, true. But already I am starting to feel the stress his family must feel; how many times can you wipe a slate clean and put honest hope in someone, even if you love them? I cannot help but believe that a soul can only carry so much hope for each specific person. What happens when that hope is used up? With a close friend working his way through the twelve step Alcoholics Anonymous program, maybe this is what I should take from the story. To work on my patience and increasing my hope.

After the afterword (of course there's more. Why wouldn't there be?) we are invited to look at Nic's blog, http://nicscheff.blogspot.com. Here we can read about a chunk of Nic's life after the novel was finished. Many of the entries are rambling, confusing (perhaps what his writing is truly like without editors), and I find myself wondering whether they were written high or sober. Its frustrating. I want to find this boy and shake him. My drug-free, upper middle class white upbringing has not taught me how to handle hardcore relapse. I am aching for a happy ending, even if its fictional. Even as an obsessively honest person, I want a lie here. I am tempted to type a page of "and then he lived happily ever after" and staple it into every copy of Tweak I can find at the bookstore, just to give future readers some piece of mind.

That being said, I am most definitely taking a break from memoirs for awhile. I'm not sure how much more my frayed nerves can handle. This afternoon I think I'll put the Tums away and start looking into some e.e. cummings, which will still fill my weird quota, but with less needles and methamphetamines (I hope).