San Francisco

San Francisco is the central home city of the Sheff family’s early life and a recurring setting in David Sheff’s account of Nic Sheff’s childhood, family changes, and later disappearances. The city first appears as a place of school, shared routines, and discovery; years later, David searches its streets for Nic, and a medical crisis brings David back across the Golden Gate Bridge for treatment. These changing uses make San Francisco both a lived-in family setting and a landscape through which the narrative registers separation and fear.

Childhood and School

At five, Nic begins kindergarten at a progressive school in San Francisco, housed in a century-old redwood-shingled building. Its open, communal character is reflected in the way parents can come in at snack time and cook quesadillas with the children. Stone steps and barnlike doors open onto a play yard with a springy surface made from recycled tires, tetherball, basketball, and a redwood climbing structure. The school’s emphasis on the whole child combines the basic academic subjects with music, art, plays written by the children, and noncompetitive games. Its calendar recognizes both secular and religious holidays, including Christmas, Hanukkah, Chinese New Year, and Kwanzaa.

The account presents this school as a particularly fitting setting for Nic’s early creativity and individuality. He experiments with clay and finger-paint and assembles an eccentric costume from a large cowboy hat, a Keith Haring T-shirt, a fringed vest, blue tights, underpants, and elephant-ear Velcro sneakers. When classmates tease him for wearing tights, he counters that Superman wears them. David takes pride in Nic’s confidence rather than treating his difference as something to correct. At a later school in the city, Nic is a fourth grader when the family lives across the bay in Sausalito; he travels to school with another family and plays second base on a Little League team. His coach describes him as a leader, and David and Karen Barbour cheer him on in his green Braves uniform.

Family Life Across the Bay

During a quieter period after David’s divorce, San Francisco provides the setting for regular father-and-son activities. On weekends, David and Nic walk along the Embarcadero and up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower, ride a cable car to Chinatown for dim sum and firecrackers, and take BART to Berkeley to walk along Telegraph Avenue. They also go to films at the Castro Theatre, where an organist plays before the screenings. The city and its transit routes make their time together expansive: neighborhood walks, public transport, and familiar local destinations become part of the rhythms of an ordinary family life.

At home, their weekday evenings include homework, games, cooking, and reading. Nic enjoys books such as A Wrinkle in Time, The Outsiders, and The Hobbit. After reading Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, the family marks one of Nic’s unbirthday parties by setting a formal table for stuffed animals and dining with them on pillows. These domestic scenes complement the outings around San Francisco: the city is not merely a backdrop for excursions, but the center of a daily life David is trying to make stable.

Sausalito, School, and the Move North

When Karen moves from New York to live with David and Nic in San Francisco, she and Nic spend long stretches drawing together. Their collaboration produces cartoon characters and a decorated park scene on long strips of butcher paper. Nic’s school report about Karen describes her decision to return to San Francisco to join the family. The city therefore becomes the place where a new household takes shape, not just the location of David and Nic’s earlier life together.

Soon afterward, the family rents an old, leaky Victorian in Sausalito because they want a backyard. The house is cold enough that they rely on fires and heavy quilts, and their life includes tide-pooling and ferry trips across the bay to San Francisco. The city remains a practical and social center even as the family lives across the water: Nic attends school there, and the adults arrange a carpool. Later, drawn to West Marin, the family builds a house and studio in the Inverness hillside garden and moves there before Nic begins sixth grade at a new school. That move marks a change in the family’s geography: San Francisco has been the site of Nic’s early schooling and shared routines, but it is no longer the family’s home base.

A City of Search and Return

Much later, after Nic disappears during a relapse, San Francisco takes on a starkly different meaning. Vicki contacts Z., who reports that Nic has called her from the city and was high. David, desperate for news, returns to search. He drives along Mission Street, looking into the open doorways of shops, taquerias, and bars, then parks on Ashbury and walks back and forth along Haight Street. He checks head shops, bookstores, a pizza place, a café, and Amoeba, repeatedly mistaking other people for Nic. He also revisits a clearing in Golden Gate Park where he had previously met a girl addicted to methamphetamine; this time, apart from two women with their toddlers, the area is empty.

The search does not bring Nic back. At home, David calls Randy, who tells him that Nic will not stay away long because he is not enjoying himself. David remains afraid that Nic may overdose or suffer lasting harm. Nic is gone for a week and then another, while David tries to work and keep up family and social plans. The contrast is sharp: the same city once associated with school, outings, and an expanding family is now a place David scans for a son who does not want to be found.

Medical Return and Narrative Significance

San Francisco also becomes the destination for David’s hospital transfer. After a neurosurgeon proposes inserting a shunt to relieve pressure, Karen agrees to the procedure. With help from her sister, a nurse at the University of California Medical Center, and a close friend who is a neuro-oncologist there, David is transferred to the neuro ICU at UCSF Medical Center. The ambulance crosses the Golden Gate Bridge into the city. This return is not a homecoming in any uncomplicated sense: San Francisco is now the setting for intensive medical care, following an emergency far removed from the city’s earlier domestic scenes.

Across these episodes, San Francisco’s significance lies in its recurrence rather than in a single defining event. It is where Nic first attends school, where father and son build habits of shared attention, and where Karen joins their family. It remains connected to the family after their move across the bay and north to Inverness, then reappears as the terrain of David’s search and the site of his hospital transfer. The city’s changing role follows the family’s own shifts: from childhood belonging, through geographic change, to the uncertainty of addiction and illness.