The Myth of Normal 184

workaholic, to the detriment of her family life. Until she invited me onto her Last Day podcast, she was convinced—adamant, in fact—that she and Harris had grown up in a normal, happy home. Her remembered evidence for that normalcy and happiness included their mother’s involvement in many school activities—field trip chaperone, president of the PTA, and so on—and a home life where the spousal roles were stable in the traditional sense: working dad, housewife mom. The sense of security inspired by all these arrangements may well have been real; it certainly sounds like Wittels Wachs grew up with a mother and father who loved their children as best they could and provided for their physical and social needs. Yet embedded in that “normalcy” were experiences of profound emotional hurt she had completely discounted, until they were conjured up from the depths by my questions. “This whole exchange caught me off guard,” she confessed to her listeners afterward. “He is absolutely fucking correct. My talking points on my happy childhood are incomplete.” David Sheff was likewise “caught off guard” by a similar realization. His book, Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction, which depicts his son Nick’s nearly fatal stimulant habit, was a bestseller and, more recently, the subject of a poignant film starring Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet. There had been no big-T trauma in this family, no child abuse or dire adversity. Perplexed, Sheff was forced to ask himself uncomfortable questions to understand what had impelled his talented, vivacious, highly sensitive eldest child into a life-threatening addiction. Looking back, Sheff saw that Nick’s pain must have originated early on, in the crucible of a dysfunctional parental relationship. “We shouldn’t have been together,” he told me. “We had terrible, terrible problems in our marriage.” Self-delusion played a major role: even while engaging in an extramarital affair with a family friend, Sheff harbored “this fantasy in my mind that, you know, if I was happy and she was happy, the kids would be together and then we’d have this happy family and we’d be sort of freeing them from these two traumatic families . . . I actually believed that I was doing this in some ways for Nick. I was justifying it, trying to make it okay.” It is to Sheff’s credit that he has been willing to look back with open eyes at