"In her lovely, elliptical memoir of family and loss, Hampl brings her late mother and father back to life then gently lays them to rest again. 'Nothing is harder to grasp than the relentlessly modest life,' she writes. Then she does just that, conjuring not just her parents' modesty but everything that was extraordinary and mysterious about them, from her astringent mother's sense of adventure to the late-in-life revelations of her mild-mannered father, a St. Paul florist who brought 'an aura of quiet, to the flowers he arranged.' This beautiful bouquet of a book commemorates both." —Entertainment Weekly, A–

David Sheff's story is a first: a teenager's addiction from the parent's point of view—a real-time chronicle of the shocking, inevitable descent into substance abuse and the gradual emergence into hope. Any parent of an addict will find solace in Sheff's beautifully written account of his struggle to overcome his son’s methamphetamine habit.
Join the conversation at the Beautiful Boy forums.