University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley appears in the memoir as more than a campus: it is a place where the narrator’s youthful academic ambitions coexist with heavy student drug use, and where Nic Sheff later experiences a promising start followed by isolation and academic disengagement. Their separate Berkeley years connect education with the family’s changing understanding of addiction, while Nic’s departure exposes how little the family can know from grades, explanations, or plans alone.

The Narrator’s Berkeley Years

After a road trip brought him to San Francisco, the narrator felt an immediate sense of release from the life he had known in Arizona. He applied to transfer to University of California, Berkeley, before his transcript had suffered, and was accepted for the fall. At a time when students could construct individual social-science field majors, he chose to focus on death and human consciousness. The choice gives his Berkeley experience a distinctive intellectual frame, though the memoir sets serious study alongside a social environment in which academic life and intoxication frequently overlapped.

The narrator describes embracing his studies while also taking part in weekends centered on cocaine and marijuana. A friend’s father, who was a doctor, supplied bottles of Quaaludes in an effort to keep his son away from street drugs. The narrator regarded his own use as excessive, though not unusual among those around him. This account presents Berkeley not as the cause of his drug use, but as a place where he experienced the normalization of drugs within student life.

His college friend Charles provides a more troubling contrast. The narrator kept in touch as Charles’s drinking and drug use escalated. During the narrator’s first summer in Berkeley, Charles moved from Tucson, enrolled in summer school, and shared an apartment with him. One evening, Charles brought home crystal meth after his dealer had run out of cocaine. The narrator tried it with him, describing the drug’s powerful initial effects and the depleted, agitated state that followed. He later contrasts their patterns: he would stop late-night partying because he had class, while Charles was only beginning his night. In retrospect, Charles’s escalating use makes the narrator worry about Nic, joining the institution’s earlier history in the memoir to the later family crisis without treating the two men’s lives as identical.

Nic’s Arrival and Promise

Years later, Nic chose University of California, Berkeley for college. On a warm August afternoon, the narrator, Karen Barbour, Jasper Sheff, and Daisy Sheff drove him to campus, stopping for pizza before helping him settle into Bowles Hall, an old Tudor dormitory. Jasper admired the building as castle-like. The family carried Nic’s luggage through its stone entrance and up two flights of stairs to his room, where they met roommates who seemed serious and studious. One was assembling a home-built computer; another had an assortment of singers’ CDs that differed sharply from Nic’s musical tastes. The scene establishes a concrete beginning: Nic had a room, roommates, family support, and a place in a university he had chosen.

At first, his calls suggested engagement, especially with a painting course. He soon complained that he could not build straight stretcher bars for his canvases and had to carry them across campus. Then frustration extended to his other courses, whose instructors he regarded as unqualified teaching assistants rather than professors. The narrator encouraged him through what he hoped was a difficult beginning. Nic’s early difficulties were not presented as proof that college was impossible for him; the family initially understood them as problems that might ease with time.

Disengagement and Departure

Nic’s calls grew less regular. He seemed distracted, stopped returning them, and eventually reported staying with friends and spending time in the underground music scene. The narrator urged him to persist and suggested that he contact counselors at the student health center or his therapist. Nic agreed that counseling might help, but the narrator suspected he would not follow through. A week later, one of Nic’s roommates called because Nic had not appeared for several days. The gap between the family’s limited information and the roommate’s alarm makes the university setting a point of distance as well as opportunity.

In late fall, Nic called to say that college was not working. The narrator suspected drugs and raised rehabilitation, but Nic said he was not using much and described himself as depressed and unready for college. He thought he needed time to work on himself. The narrator found the explanation plausible, in part because depression seemed easier to accept than a drug problem. He also considered the genuine difficulty of distinguishing depression from drug-related symptoms in adolescents and young adults, and the possibility that drug use and underlying problems could become entangled. The memoir preserves that uncertainty rather than presenting Nic’s explanation as a settled diagnosis.

Nic also concluded that University of California, Berkeley had been a mistake and that a smaller college might suit him better. He said he had tried to follow his father’s advice and see a counselor, but faced a long line merely to make an appointment and was told the first available appointment was a week away. He proposed taking a year away from school to work and recover his physical and mental shape before applying elsewhere. The university’s scale and appointment process thus entered the family’s account of his departure, though the narrative does not establish them as the sole reason he struggled.

The University’s Place in the Family Narrative

Nic moved back home and agreed to a plan involving therapy, curfews, household responsibilities, work, and applications to other colleges. His therapist supported the plan. For a time, he seemed somewhat better, and he applied to small liberal-arts colleges on the East Coast. Hampshire College became his first choice after a campus visit where he had been drawn to its setting and atmosphere, sat in on English and political-science classes, and toured music and drama studios. His acceptance led the narrator to breathe easier and to imagine that Nic was back on a path toward college. That relief was provisional: at home, Nic still spent most of his time in his room when he was not working.

The memoir’s wider account of drug use places these personal histories against a changing national backdrop. It reports that a 2006 survey of drug-enforcement agencies found methamphetamine to be the most significant drug problem for a plurality of respondents, and describes treatment admissions for methamphetamine addiction as having risen sharply between 1993 and 2005. These figures do not establish that University of California, Berkeley caused or uniquely represented the trend. Instead, they widen the frame around the narrator’s and Nic’s experiences: the university is one setting within a story about drug use that crosses geography and social class, while the specific causes and course of an individual’s addiction remain difficult to determine.

Across the two generations, University of California, Berkeley marks both intellectual possibility and the limits of what a family can infer from educational progress. The narrator’s chosen field and Nic’s initial interest in painting coexist with drug use, missed classes, social withdrawal, and eventually a change of plan. Nic’s departure is not a resolution of the questions raised there; it redirects them toward treatment, family rules, and the uncertain work of finding a setting in which he might begin again.