Memories You Don't Want to Remember

The memoir that I chose to write about is "My Addicted Son" by David Sheff. This memoir starts off as a happy story but takes a turn for the worse. A father, his son and his daughter go to the airport to pick up his oldest son who is coming back from college. The two younger children are very excited to see the oldest boy, Nick, who they haven't seen in six months. The next scene is the oldest boy reading a bed time story to the two younger kids and then putting them to sleep. That night the father, who is also the narrator, hears the oldest boy fumbling around the kitchen like he is looking for something. The next morning the whole family is eating breakfast and the father can tell that something is not right with Nick. Nick and the father say goodbye to the younger children after Nick makes plans to have fun with them when they get home from school and then father confronts his oldest son. The father asks Nick if he is using again and Nick blows him off and leaves. The two younger children come home to find out that Nick is gone.

The beginning of the story almost makes it seem like there isn't going to be any conflict at all. However, as I eventually found out, there is really two conflicts. The more obvious one is an external conflict between the father and his son. The father wants his son to stop and Nick really doesn't seem to care what his dad says or thinks. The other conflict is an internal one with Nick. He knows what he's doing is wrong but he continues to do it anyway. It is a very bad addiction that, at times, he cannot control. If he doesn't want to stop for his father, or even for himself, he should stop for his two younger siblings. To be honest, there really isn't a resolution to this story. The narrator talks about how Nick had been one hundred and fifty days clean off of meth and things were going good for him at his new school on the east coast, but he could never completely control or get rid of his addiction. The point of the story, in turn, is that although Nick tried, with the help of his father, some things cannot be beaten. The addiction to meth can at times be harder to break than being addicted to cocaine or heroine. Therefore, the real point is the realization that Nick is very much addicted to meth, he needs help and he keeps letting his family down.

This particular story is very relevant to people around my age. We are all at college now and were are going to be around alcohol and drugs. This story can teach us a lesson about how dangerous drugs can be and how they can affect our whole life. Even though most of the drugs here are not hard drugs, these gateway drugs and can lead us to experimenting with hard drugs and then we are screwed. Being as the narrator of the memoir is the father, I think that the main intended audience are parents. This father is trying to warn other parents to watch out and make sure that their kids aren't trying anything like this so that they don't have to deal with what he is dealing with. I also think that this father is targeting teenage and college kids by trying to almost scare them into staying away from drugs. Some of the narrative techniques that I liked were the dialogue and the misleading beginning. The dialogue was very forceful and really made me feel like I was sitting at the table and feeling the tension between them. The other technique I really liked was how the story started off like it was going to be a very happy story, but then the story turned tables. I feel like that really keeps the reader interested in what is happening and to see if any other twists or turns are going to occur. The transitions are good in this memoir. I always knew where I was in this story.