Reviews with content warning for Blood - Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines

Nic Sheff is an amazing writer. I enjoyed his book and his fathers very much. Obviously they were hard to read knowing that happened to real life people. I wish they didn’t make this into a movie because people forget that Nic and David are actual people and they went through so much. This book did not hold back anything. It had so many difficult parts. This story is raw, emotional, tense, but also hopeful in a way. I recommend reading both books.

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thalia_gossling's review

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.75

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halosreputation's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

4.25

Bought this after reading Beautiful Boy (the companion memoir) not expecting to like it as much - I actually enjoyed it more. It's more fast-paced and less repetitive in comparison, reads more like a story, and offers the full picture of what actually happened with Nic. I don't know which I would suggest reading first - Beautiful Boy offers a lot of interesting facts and research into drug addiction and of course the devastating outside perspective of the parent. I would recommend Tweak if you're purely interested in the first-person perspective of addiction. Reading Tweak afterward definitely felt like filling in all of the gaps in David's story. I enjoyed both of them, but feel more connected with Nic's story, though I suspect that is an age/circumstance thing.

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shewantsthediction's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

2.0

Well that was mostly a waste of my time.

Nic somehow manages to be both sympathetic and infuriating in this book - sympathetic because he has bipolar disorder and feels like a raw, exposed nerve all the time; he's so sensitive he feels he needs to dull his feelings and quiet his mind with drugs, which is definitely relatable. But he's also infuriating because of his repetitive, spiraling thought patterns and the way he describes other people. Most women are either "fat" or "wearing too much makeup" - except for the ones he finds attractive, of course. There's also some ableist/racist things in here - one of his friends uses the "r slur" and he describes a Black woman as "masculine-looking," which is just a tale as old as time.

He's also your typical privileged person and just thinks some very nasty thoughts about other people in general. Still, I respect that he at least owns his dickishness - it almost makes you like him a little. Oh and he's also a writer, who of course idolizes a bunch of other white male writers. The only ones I can remember right now are Charles Bukowski and George Miller, but you get the picture.

He writes decently - his sentences are punchy, short, with a staccato rhythm that I think fits the topic well. He has a bad habit of tacking on "and things" or "and stuff" to the end of his sentences, though. My personal opinion is that he needed a harsher editor on this. The book is way too long and the escapades are similar enough that they could've been easily condensed. A lot of him getting high/sober/relapsing over and over again is just repetitive and not very interesting past a certain point. Like I understand it's a story about addiction, but ultimately it's unsatisfying because

we never get closure with the girlfriend he has in the second half of the book, Zelda, or any of his friends. He also never gives us his final thoughts on the whole "god" ordeal he was sweating over the whole book.

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