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Introduction
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Beautiful Boy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Addiction, Ruin, and Redemption
Responsibility and Blame
Parenthood and Control
Support vs. Enabling
The Disease Model, Stigma, and Treatment
Summary
Analysis
Nic is born on July 20, 1982, to David and his wife Vicki, who live in Berkeley, California. They are “enraptured” by Nic, seeking out the best for him. As a child, Nic loves music and building structures out of Legos. He is thoughtful and curious, enjoying puppet shows, board games, and sing-a-longs.
The early chapters of Beautiful Boy are largely spent detailing Nic’s promise and innocence, and David’s early understanding of parenthood and how to navigate it. While Nic’s early childhood is idyllic, the missteps that both David and Nic make in his upbringing have a deep and lasting effect on his development.
Themes
When Nic is three years old, however, Vicki and David start to feel their marriage dissolving, despite their shared devotion to him. David falls in love with a family friend, and when they visit a couple’s therapist, he insists that his marriage is already over. Nic is hit hard by the divorce, and Vicki and David agree to joint custody, shuttling him back and forth between two homes.
David and Vicki’s divorce becomes the first major struggle in Nic’s young life—David later describes it as the most “traumatic event” of Nic’s childhood. This is one of the things for which David blames himself, wondering whether Nic might not have been as inclined to use drugs if David and Vicki had stayed together.
Themes
Vicki then moves to Los Angeles and remarries, and she and David arrange a formal custody agreement. They decide to ask Nic’s therapist, whom he has been seeing since the divorce began, to figure out the best arrangement for Nic. The therapist launches a “three-month investigation,” interviewing family, friends, and Nic. She explains what she has learned: while Nic is an “exceptional child,” he is suffering from the divorce, and the therapist’s goal is to minimize that stress. She determines that Nic will spend the school year with David, and Vicki will have Nic for summers and holidays. David and Vicki agree to the arrangement.
This is another aspect of David and Vicki’s decisions of which David becomes critical in hindsight. He states later that Nic should not have been made to do the traveling in their arrangement—that on top of the divorce itself, this adds yet another source of stress and instability in his life. As David searches for something to blame for Nic’s addiction, he returns to the custody agreement to place the responsibility on himself.
Themes
It is tough for Vicki and David to lose their son half of the time, but it is harder for Nic. At five years old, he starts flying alone between San Francisco and Los Angeles. When he and David say goodbye, they say “everything”—their way of saying I love you, I miss you, and I’m sorry in one word. On the plane, Nic orders Coca-Cola (forbidden at home), because the flights are the only times he does not have a parent watching over him.
David illustrates how much he and Nic love each other in their goodbye, which will recur throughout the book. Yet at the same time, David begins to hint at the inherent loss of control of his son that now comes with losing him half of the time. David’s mention of Nic ordering the soda is a subtle hint at the idea that Nic, under less supervision, has a tendency toward indulging in things he knows are forbidden.
Themes
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At five, Nic begins kindergarten in San Francisco and begins to display his creativity, confidence, and individuality. He gains an eclectic group of friends and develops a deep interest in movies. He also gets in trouble occasionally, prank-calling local restaurants and bars, but mostly he behaves well. Report cards note that he is creative, compassionate, funny, and “a leader in class.”
The fact that Nic is so widely admired by other kids and praised by his teachers at a young age again illustrates how much promise he has. This is one of the things that makes Nic’s early drug use so difficult for David to recognize as a problem.
Themes
David keeps a box of Nic’s artwork and writings. One writing assignment asks if a person should always try their best. A young Nic writes, “I don’t think you should always try your best all the time, […] because, let’s say a drug atick [sic] asks you for drugs you should not try your best to find him some drugs.”
This story serves two purposes: the first is to illustrate that Nic understands at a young age that drug use is dangerous—it is not as though David didn’t impress these values upon him, even in elementary school. But it also foreshadows an important lesson that David must learn: while he must try to support Nic, he shouldn’t enable Nic’s drug addiction, as Nic so astutely points out here.
Themes
Sometimes, teachers report that Nic seems a little depressed, and David explains that Nic is sometimes afraid—perhaps because of his parents’ constant watchfulness or the “faces of missing children on milk cartons.” Nic and his friends won’t play outside unless David is there. Before Nic goes to sleep, he asks David to check on him every 15 minutes. David sings to Nic to soothe him, a song about a father making a monster go away.
This is another instance of David foreshadowing the events to come, planting the seeds as to why Nic’s addiction is so difficult for David. He loves his son deeply and is used to being needed and helping him. But unlike Nic’s nightmares, David cannot chase the “monster” of Nic’s addiction away—it is something that Nic must battle on his own.
Themes
