David Sheff

There isn't just one way to get healthy and sober and to stop using. ”

It's hard to find someone who did as many drugs for as long and in such dangerous combinations as Nic - spending years going to Oakland and finding abandoned warehouses, getting beaten up, getting threatened by a guy with a crossbow. By all accounts, he shouldn't have made it, but he did. ”

Everyone's generation probably feels like they're parenting in a better way. ”

Your children live or die without you. No matter what we do, no matter how we agonize or obsess, we cannot choose for our children whether they live or die. It's a devastating realization, but liberating. ”

When I was a child, my parents didn't know anything about drugs. They didn't even drink. ”

Few adults realize what a huge force video games have become in children's lives. ”

So often we have this image of what drug addiction looks like, and it's not fun. Our loved ones who go down that path are in pain. ”

At some point, parents may become inured to a child's self-destruction, but I never did. ”

Nick spent his first years on walks in his stroller and Snugli, playing in Berkeley parks and baby gyms and visiting zoos and aquariums. His mother and I divorced when he was 4. No child benefits from the bitterness and savagery of a divorce like ours. ”

Nick's mother and I were attentive, probably overly attentive - part of the first wave of parents obsessed with our children in a self-conscious way. ”