Heather King
Heather King is an essayist, memoirist, and blogger. Raised on the coast of New Hampshire, she struggled with alcoholism for many years, got sober in 1987, and converted to Catholicism in 1996.
She is the author of nine books of essay and memoir, and has recorded over 30 slice-of-life commentaries for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."
She also speaks nationwide, writes a weekly arts and culture column for “Angelus,” the archdiocesan newspaper of LA, and a monthly column on unsung saints for “Magnificat” magazine.
Her work, which she roughly defines as "the tragicomedy of the cross," ranges in subject from addiction to vocational crises, conversion, food, money, cancer, unrequited love, prayer and healing from abortion.
She lives in Pasadena, CA. For more info and her blog, visit Heather King: Mystery, Smarts, Laughs.
“There's nothing inherently interesting about being a drunk -- in fact, quite the contrary.”
“My heart was beating so hard that for a second I thought I might pass out. It was like revisiting the hole where you'd once been held in solitary confinement: a force field of muscle-memory-stored pain and toxic energy so palpable I was afraid that if I stayed any longer it might suck me back in.”
“If I've made any "progress" it's that now I know I'll be an alcoholic till the day I die, and that is both my biggest cross and my greatest blessing.”
“Like the rest of the world, they seemed to have figured out something I didn't know - where they'd come from, where they were going - and moved on.”
“Children laugh an average of three hundred or more times a day; adults laugh an average of five times a day. We have a lot of catching up to do.”
“I once heard a sober alcoholic say that drinking never made him happy, but it made him feel like he was going to be happy in about fifteen minutes. That was exactly it, and I couldn’t understand why the happiness never came, couldn’t see the flaw in my thinking, couldn’t see that alcohol kept me trapped in a world of illusion, procrastination, paralysis. I lived always in the future, never in the present. Next time, next time! Next time I drank it would be different, next time it would make me feel good again. And all my efforts were doomed, because already drinking hadn’t made me feel good in years.”
“Was I being groomed for some special mission? What possible purpose could an existence like mine serve? When I wasn’t drinking in crappy bars, I was home by myself reading: a life that was achingly lonely, and yet perversely designed to prevent anybody from ever getting close enough to really know me.”
“I had no idea what time I’d left, how I’d gotten home, who’d been up here, and how long he, she, or they had stayed. Another night, added to the hundreds that had gone before, shrouded in mystery. Really, when you thought about it, it was creepy. My own life was a secret to me.”
“Looking out over the water, I spotted him right away,straddling his board. He was only a dot, but I would have known him anywhere.I thought of the shape of his hands,the hollow at the base of his spine,the way my heart had never stopped skipping a beat at the sound of his voice, and I realized it was the kind of loss- because I knew now that the thing I wanted more than anything in the world not to go fully wrong could- from which I would never fully recover. And I'm not sure I ever fully have.”