Newsweek

Newsweek published Nic Sheff’s writing in its My Turn section, giving a high-school journalist a national magazine platform for a personal critique of long-distance joint custody. The column made the strain of his family’s arrangement public in his own words, especially through its closing line: “I am always missing someone.”

Publication and Context

Nic Sheff first submitted columns to the annual Ernest Hemingway Writing Award for high school journalists, where he won first place. He then sent a column to Newsweek’s My Turn section; the magazine published it in February 1999. The sequence placed the publication within an early period of recognition for his writing, before his later memoir work.

The Column’s Argument

The piece indicted long-distance joint custody by asking divorced parents to consider the geographical consequences of separation for their children. It proposed, pointedly, that parents who had children and later divorced should remain near them—or take responsibility for traveling to see them. Rather than treating custody as an abstract arrangement, the column framed distance as a recurring absence in a child’s life.

Significance in Nic Sheff’s Writing

Newsweek’s publication of the column gave Nic Sheff a venue to address a family experience that had shaped him for years. Its force rested on the compressed statement “I am always missing someone”: a personal account of separation that also expressed the central cost he attributed to the arrangement. The available account establishes Newsweek’s specific role as the publisher of this column, without describing the magazine’s broader editorial practices or institutional history.