We All
Fall Down by Nic Sheff is the follow-up to his debut, Tweak, and it’s a semi-riveting and
completely frustrating book about drug usage and addiction. I imagine that’s
kind of the point, but please note this going in. It results in a disjointed
and intentionally odd narrative at times. (And a heads-up – Spoilers follow on
this book, and his other works.)
First, the
background – Sheff is the son of David, who did one of the best video game
books of all-time, Game
Over. It’s since been done a bit more in detail by Stephen
Kent and others, but his book came out in 1999, when I was 15, and I
remember it being one of the few non-industry (magazine) tomes about video
games.
After Game Over, he wrote Beautiful
Boy, which was released in 2008. It was all about Nic’s addiction to
drugs – primarily meth – and how he was coping with it as a father. The book
ended on a somewhat hopeful note, as David noted that Nic had about a year of
sobriety at the time of the book’s publishing.
From there, Tweak
by Nic Sheff came out in January 2009. If you’re looking for a scary, frantic,
haunting book about drug usage, then jeebus, this is what you want. My skin
literally itched while reading some portions. It was an Oprah Book Club choice,
and they excerpted
some of the tamer aspects of the first chapter.
Tweak is a remarkable novel on its own,
but Nic produced a follow-up in April 2012, We
All Fall Down. And to make a completely random comparison – At one point in
his Dark Tower saga, Stephen King
writes that the story is done and resolved, at least the happy bits, and if you
don’t want that image to be spoiled in your mind, don’t read on. Well, We All Fall Down basically takes that
concept and runs with it.
We learn
that Tweak basically came about
because Nic managed to manipulate his way out of rehabs in Arizona and New
Mexico, latching on and living with a southern gal in Alabama. Once he’s there,
he’s almost immediately drinking and smoking pot daily, while he’s writing Tweak.
While
reading, it made me feel, well, odd. Like that entire last quarter of Tweak is basically a lie. Obviously, We All Fall Down is a bit of an attempt
by Nic to set the record straight about his addiction, and to also document and
layout the thought process of an addict. It’s shocking how crassly manipulative
he is at times, and he also writes in a way that obscures this, presenting his
logic as it occurs in his mind.
The overall
result is an interesting book, but one that’s really hard to read, and there
ain’t no heroes in the tale. To steal from the wonderful TV Tropes, most of the
book is an exercise in black
and grey morality or grey and
gray morality. Who do you find more sympathetic – the unreliable narrator
who is always thisclose to doing meth, his shrewish and co-dependent
girlfriend, his constantly relapsing former lover or the well-meaning but
pressuring father?
The image is watermarked, and I used it to
inject a little levity here.
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