Scottsdale is both a childhood home and a place of return in David Sheff’s account. The city holds the family’s ordinary routines and the remembered landscape of Nic Sheff’s early childhood; years later, walking the old neighborhood with Nic, David confronts the distance between the boy he remembers and the adolescent beside him.

The family’s move west

David’s family left the area near Walden Pond in Lexington, Massachusetts after his father, a chemical engineer with hay fever, accepted work at a semiconductor plant in Phoenix. They drove west in a pea-green Studebaker, staying in motels and eating at roadside restaurants. In Arizona, the family initially lived in a motel while a tract house was built in Scottsdale.

David’s father worked at Motorola growing, slicing, and etching silicon wafers used to make transistors and microprocessors. His mother wrote for the Scottsdale Daily Progress, reporting on school and neighborhood life, including science-fair winners and Little League results. These details place the family within the city’s suburban routines: a new house, technical work, and a local newspaper’s record of community events.

A remembered neighborhood

David recalls the children of the block playing outside until twilight, when their mothers called them in for dinner. Games, barbecues, go-carts, Cub Scouts and Brownies, and rides down the Salt and Verde rivers make up the texture of that childhood. The family’s television dinners and evening programs belong to the same recollection of a seemingly safer, more innocent world.

That memory is not uncomplicated. News passed among adults in hushed conversations: a ten-year-old on the block died by suicide, and a girl living two doors away was killed in a car accident involving an older boy who was high on drugs. The recollection thus unsettles its own nostalgia. Even the neighborhood David remembers as secure contained loss and drug-related danger.

Returning with Nic

During a visit to David’s parents for a family party in Arizona, David and Nic walk around the old block. Palm trees have grown tall and thin, and some houses have acquired second stories, but the street otherwise appears much the same. The changed trees and remodeled homes mark the passage of time without erasing the landscape David recognizes.

The walk recalls an earlier route David took with Nic when he was two or three. David led him with a rope tied to a small plastic car, with Nic sitting in the driver’s seat. At Chaparral Park, Nic acted out stopping and getting out before running to the man-made lake to feed bread to ducks and geese. An old goose bit his finger, and Nic cried. Against this childhood scene, Nic’s later emotional distance is stark: David tries to draw him into conversation, while Nic has little to say. He eventually asks David whether he wants to smoke marijuana, a question David cannot confidently interpret as a test, an assertion of independence, an attempt at connection, or some combination of these.

Personal memory and the wider problem

Scottsdale is not presented as a cause of Nic’s addiction or as a detailed account of local drug conditions. Instead, the book places family memories of Arizona alongside a wider discussion of methamphetamine’s spread across the United States. The account describes an epidemic that had moved beyond western cities into the Midwest, South, and East Coast, and cites a 2006 survey in which 40 percent of drug-enforcement agencies named methamphetamine their most significant drug problem.

The narration also resists turning geography, class, or family background into a simple explanation for addiction. David observes that people with addiction appear across socioeconomic circumstances and that the available evidence does not establish a definitive cause for Nic’s condition. In this larger structure, Scottsdale remains a particular family place—remembered through a childhood street, a park, and a return walk—while the questions raised by Nic’s addiction exceed any one neighborhood.