Tweak

Nic Sheff's Tweak is a book that is difficult to read. Not because the wording is particularly hard to understand, or because he says things I find it hard to relate to; on the contrary, it is disturbingly easy to follow where he is at in this book and recognize how he got there. It is a fantastic book, and it makes me want to read the one written by his father so I can get a perspective on his story from the man Nic has the utmost respect for.
It is not too difficult to connect with Nic in this story - I haven't gotten to the point he is at and I don't have any issues with addiction, but I see the reasoning behind what started him on that path and I can connect with it. The feelings he had and his life around him resonates a lot with the way I felt growing up and the lives of some of my friends, and it is not difficult to see myself or others in a completely different place and state of mind if we had reacted in the same ways he had.
Nic seems to be a man that is just trying to run from life, and from the normalcy he saw himself heading towards. He talked about wanting to excel at almost anything, and that his desire for attaining perfection drove him to start doing the things he did. It is interesting, because you hear about the stories of addicts a lot nowadays thanks to half the shows on TV and most celebrities being very open with the things they do - a lot of these people seem to do it more because it was convenient, or because they had a really crappy home life and didn't know how to handle it; most of Nic's life growing up, aside from dealing with a strenuous relationship between his birth parents, was spent doing fairly well for himself. Great at school, surrounded by friends and family but still feeling like an outsider, eventually he needed an escape from the life he had built up around himself and it led to to his addiction. This story is, without a doubt, easy to read - this combined with how simple it is to connect to on many levels made it difficult to put the book down.